The question rattling around many a Liverpudlian head right now must be something like: “Do we really need another arts space in this city?”
In the race toward proving itself as an innovative and vibrant arts city for the European Capital of Culture 2008 is Liverpool milking the arts for all it’s worth? Most probably! And, why not? It’s certainly a great moment for any self-respecting city to get as many forward-thinking and arts-focused projects off the ground (as is humanly possible). Particularly when all eyes will be, for a time at least, turned in your direction.
However, some critics of the “arts storm troopers” have been asking; “With so much arts activity what will Greenland Street offer as a point of difference for local artists and the wider UK arts community?”
A Foundation is the Liverpool-based charity behind the launch of Greenland Street this September. Three former industrial buildings in the heart of Liverpool’s “Baltic Triangle” have been transformed into one of the largest exhibition spaces for the UK contemporary arts. Greenland Street comprises three major venues; The Blade Factory, The Coach Shed and The Furnace.
Greenland Street’s mission is clearly focused on delivering a highly innovative series of contemporary visual arts events that showcase the very best local, national and international contemporary arts practice. And Greenland Street is quite possibly onto the very next Big Thing in terms of keeping pace with current cultural trends. For in the last decade, the contemporary arts in the UK have gained what can only be described as a mass following.
In 1998, James Moores created A Foundation to support the development and exhibition of contemporary art in Liverpool. The A Foundation (a fully registered UK charity) was the path by which Moores, an amateur artist and art lover himself, initiated the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art in 1999. It is now the UK’s largest contemporary visual arts festival.
The Liverpool Biennial in September 2006 will launch the newly renovated site at the heart of the old port area. The Foundation has been instrumental in restoring the historic warehouses and, in the process, helping to regenerate an entire area of the city. In the tradition of great galleries such as Tate Modern, admission to Greenland Street is free and its opening hours are from Wednesday through to Sunday; 12 noon until 6pm. With an additional late closing time of 8pm on Thursday evenings.
In preparation for the Grand Opening – scheduled to coincide with the 2006 Liverpool Biennial, Greenland Street will host the following artists:
Silent Sound
Forsyth and Pollard
5 September – 26 November 2006
Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard are collaborative visual artists who work with live art, film and video and have pioneered the establishment of re-enactment as an artistic genre. Recent works have seen them re-making videos from the 1970’s, and feature the replacement of key figures with current ones and the updating of aesthetics to reflect contemporary urban music video trends.
Silent Sound is an ambitious new commission by Forsyth and Pollard and sees them collaborating with musician, Jason Spaceman. The project will employ styles, languages and techniques from Victorian séance, Spiritualism and early 1970’s performance. The Silent Sound performance will take place on Thursday 14th September at 8pm and places will be strictly limited. If you would like to register your interest in attending this event, please email your details to: kerenzah@afoundation.org.uk
Grizedale Arts
Virtual Grizedale
15 September – 26 November 2006
Grizedale Arts is based in Grizedale Forest in the heart of the Lake District. GA supports artists in making new works that relate to the context of the area and engages with local communities and events, integrating artists’ thinking and communication modes into mainstream and traditional activities. In response to Greenland Street’s invitation to “take up residence” in Liverpool, Grizedale Arts are planning to realise Virtual Grizedale which uses a “live” website that draws together activities from three sites; Japan, Egremont and Liverpool. The purpose of the GA “residency” is to create a multimedia extravaganza, occupying parts of The Blade Factory and the surrounding streets with performances, musical events, projections, sound installations and radio broadcasts.
Office for Subversive Architecture
15 September – 17 December 2006
Greenland Street has invited Office for Subversive Architecture to develop the first of Greenland’s annual architecture commission series. OSA is a collective of eight architects based in five different cities and three different countries. OSA develops projects that sit between art and architecture and which focus on the reinterpretation of public space, on its use and how people interact with it. OSA includes ideas and influences from visual art, music, film, sculpture and photography. For Greenland Street OSA has designed a structure that is playful and offers a temporary “spatial intervention” that draws on the industrial heritage of the site and is designed to act as a beacon to draw people to the area. In addition Greenland Street in partnership with Liverpool Culture Company’s Cities in Transition have developed a series of talks and discussions which will be hosted within the OSA structure and will specifically look at the relationship between art, citizenship and architecture.
Bloomberg New Contemporaries
15 September – 22 October 2006
Greenland Street is the Liverpool home of Bloomberg New Contemporaries (BNC) and will host the 2006 exhibition. BNC 2006 is an unbeatable showcase of emerging artists’ practice and has an international reputation for launching the careers of some of today’s most renowned contemporary practitioners.
Goshka Macuga
The Furnace
15 September – 26 November 2006
For her largest work yet, Macuga takes her inspiration from the expressionist sets of the silent film masterpiece, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Macuga’s installation will employ the dynamic architecture of the Furnace space to create elevated walkways, a complex of corridors filled with display cabinets, rotating platforms, hidden rooms and anti-chambers, all of which will combine to create an abstracted and distorted landscape. Within this the artist plans to curate a series of theatrical tableaux, performances and exhibitions of artworks, objects and curiosities many of which will be borrowed from local, regional and national museums.
In addition to its regular programme of events, Greenland Street (as part of its long-term commitment to contemporary arts practice) is also developing a digital archive specifically for contemporary art. The A Foundation funded Database or AD, is an unprecedented and unique digital archive system designed for the recording, publicising, storage and preservation of contemporary art works. The AD will make its debut this year with a pilot project – the digital archiving of New Contemporaries and will be an important opportunity to test drive the technology and to demonstrate its potential in the wider arts documentation context.
So with a programme line-up that promises to deliver unto Liverpool the most cutting edge visual art, live art, music, digital technologies and filmic mediums (in all their hybrid glory) it appears that Greenland Street has done its homework. Having positioned itself at the forefront of the wider UK contemporary arts context, Greenland Street is clearly intent on providing its audiences with ground-breaking works that potentially intersect all arts disciplines and promise to place it squarely on the international map.
A Foundation
67 Greenland Street
Liverpool L1 OBY
Tel: 0151 706 0600
Fax: 0151 706 0601
Web: www.afoundation.org.uk
Email: info@afoundation.org.uk
For more information about A Foundation, Greenland Street and the new Digital Database project visit the following websites:
