Salford University Graduate? Work for Curated Place!

Curated Place are extremely happy to announce, in a time of recession, we’re hiring!

Thanks to the Graduate Gateway programme at Salford University we’re looking to take on two Salford graduate placements to help us develop the Modern Lesbian project onto a national platform.

We have vacancies for a Creative Assistant and a Web Designer to work 20 hours a week for 12 weeks from the 3rd of January.  Both positions will be working closely with photographer Rachel Adams – if you don’t know her work you can still find the Modern Lesbian exhibition on the walls of 52 Princess Street.

You can find full details by following the links below:

Curated Place – Creative Assistant

Curated Place – Web Designer

However, sadly the opportunities aren’t open to all – you must be a graduate of Salford University.

Applications are open for the next 2 weeks only so if you want to work with us or know someone that does tell them to get their skates on!

UPDATE: After a few enquiries you don’t have to have graduated this year – you just have to have graduated from Salford to qualify – talk to the Salford Careers University Office for more details on their criteria – 0161 295 5088 / gateway@salford.ac.uk

Secret Artist sale at NoiseLab

Getting into the Christmas spirit early (or late if you look at the supermarkets) NOISELAB are having a ‘Secret Santa’ anonymous postcard sale on 20th November at their Market Street workshop space.

The fundraising sale consists of 200 original one-off postcard-sized artworks, all anonymised (as much as possible), that have been created and donated by leading artists including Wayne Hemingway, the legend that is Elvis Costello, Aardman Animations, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and Mancunian DJ, Producer and Teamonger Mr Scruff.

On sale for one day only from 12-6pm on Saturday the 20th November all works are priced at £45 each, regardless of whether created by a famous name or an emerging artist from the NOISEfestival.com website. A fair price too considering the right punt on a postcard could, at best, land you a big name artwork to hang on your wall or at worst leave you the proud owner of an original, unique piece of work.

All proceeds of the sales go direct to NOISE who currently receive no core funding for their work promoting new talent. Considering if they sell out that’s only £9000 it’s a small gesture that could help keep the organisation afloat through tough times.

Calling all Manchester Young Creatives

Turbulent times for funding, even amongst the big boys, calls for a proactive approach to avoid being stunned into an unhealthy state of shock and inaction. So it’s great to see Band on the Wall’s Najia Bagi and Eleanor Wotherspoon of Arts & Business coming together to provide a new space for arts professionals to get together and discuss the future of the Arts in Manchester.

They promise “No speeches, no agenda. Just an opportunity to get some talent together in the same room and create a network of young arts professionals”.

If you’re already a mover and shaker you should be there to support. If you’re looking for a way in then here’s the chance to join early doors and make new connections. Register your attendance on their eventbrite site here.

Manchester Young Creatives inaugural meeting
Friday 17th December
5pm – 7.30pm
The Picturehouse Cafe Bar
Band on the Wall (M4 5JZ)

BBC News – Arts Council England outlines cuts plan

ACE insists that working with children and young people will remain an “absolute priority”

Cue a million funding bids being hurriedly rewritten to include “the yoof”.

Tate Liverpool|City Limits

With protests, petitions and various polemics taking place around arts funding at the minute there’s no better time for the upcoming public discussion instigated by Tate Liverpool in partnership with Sky Arts –  ”City Limits“.

Chaired by broadcaster and curator Tim Marlow a panel will discuss the motion “Are large-scale public events nothing more than a waste of resources and a drain on the public purse?”

The panel will include  Helen King, Assistant Chief Constable of Merseyside Police; Right Reverend James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool, Lewis Biggs, Artistic Director Liverpool Biennial, and Helen Marriage, Co-Director of Artichoke who produce large and highly visible public events such as La Machine and Gormley’s One an Other.

Perhaps fittingly the discussion will take place in the extraordinary surroundings of the Williamson Tunnels, a seemingly insane project borne out of eccentric patronage that took place in earlier times of recession and economic hardship.

The talk takes place on Thursday 7 October from 18.45–20.00
with free short tours of the Tunnels available between 18.00 and 18.35

Tickets are £7 or £4 concessions with booking required

For tickets book online or call 0151 702 7400

The Williamson Tunnels Heritage Centre

The Old Stable Yard
Smithdown Lane
Liverpool
L7 3EE

“A seismic shift in culture and communications”

Want to hear a grown up “important message about the arts”? Then forget David Shrigley’s daft animations calling for the government to protect funding and instead watch Ben Cameron making the case for protecting and developing the arts through harsh economic and political times.

Not just for those involved in the performing arts, this is must watch material for anyone that holds an opinion about cultural funding.

Time for action

Great to see political action being encouraged by Artsfunding.ning this morning as they put a call out for people to sign up themselves and their networks to a petition calling for a full commons debate on the magnitude of financial cuts to the arts.

With huge reductions in funding anticipated in October and guaranteed by April it is imperative that the arts community in the UK makes a noise and creates a platform for debate around how creativity, particularly the non-commercial variety, is funded in this country.

Although all sectors are going to have to tighten their belts over the coming years the arts are often seen as an easy target and an unnecessary luxury in amongst the grand scheme of things. However, the arts are a major employer – generating far more revenue than they cost to fund – as well as being a major attraction for tourism (just check out the crowds for La Machine above and Deller’s Procession below), a means of creating a sense of place in an increasingly homogenised world and arguably the most effective way of encouraging community cohesion in a fragmented society.  If current models are entirely replaced with idealised visions of patronage it seems inevitable that commercial value over creative value will become the yardstick for success ultimately reducing these benefits to a mere financial calculation.

That’s why it is essential, right now, that anyone with an interest in the arts makes their voice heard.

Over the last 30 years public protest has been discredited by the powers that be to the point that anyone engaging in direct action, whether disobedient or not, is immediately labelled a kook or a crank whose voice falls outside of the realms of civilised debate allowing their concerns to be struck from the agenda prior to any discussion taking place. In order to combat this state of affairs it is incredibly important that people who wouldn’t normally involve themselves in public debate step up and make their voices heard – particularly as David Cameron has stated that any petition reaching 100,000 signatures is guaranteed a Commons debate on the matter raised.

So instead of retiring to an inherent/inherited British sensibility of tutting and reaching for the teapot/beer instead of being willing to engage in healthy confrontation, head over to GoPetition and sign up to help influence the political agenda and ultimately policy on how the arts are funded. Then encourage a friend, colleague or family member to do the same.

Fire Walk With Me…

In a move that introduces the twisted imaginings of David Lynch to the shenanigans of a Rocky Horror Show screening (which can be no bad thing) Fire Walk With Me has earned a date in the Curated Place diary.

20 years on from the TV drama that arguably shaped all quality TV drama that followed, the event will see Temple Works in Leeds transformed into the town of Twin Peaks with the hosts inviting all comers to dress up as their favourite character and enjoy an evening living the dream/nightmare of Middle America as envisaged by the Eraserhead himself.

Staged by Dave Lynch (no relation), Micheale Spessa and Emma Bearman – all artists resident in the venue’s studios – the evening promises a wonderfully weird cocktail of film, theatre and live music with proceeds going towards the purchase of a new PA for the artist’s co-operative to continue producing nights of fabulous fantasy.

Fire Walk With Me will take place at the Temple Works on Saturday 18th September from 7pm until late with tickets available now.

MLA and UK Film Council Axed

Two big blows for culture today under the new governmental cuts to the DCMS.  Both the British Film council and the MLA (Museums Libraries and Archives council) are to be wound up by 2012 under Jeremy Hunt’s cost saving initiatives.

In a depressingly polite press release MLA chief executive Roy Clare has vowed to keep working up to the finish line which will see a number of his staff moved over to the Arts Council, having been informed of the decision to close his organisation as part of a “very civilised” phone conversation on Friday.  However,  his equal number at the UK Film Council, John Woodward, has been far more vocal and direct in his objections to the cuts calling the decision “a big mistake, driven by short-term thinking and political expediency”.

Next in the firing line: English Heritage, the Heritage Lottery Fund and the National Heritage Memorial Fund.

Perhaps a minute’s silence for public sector supported culture is called for.

Jeremy Deller’s Procession passes through Manchester one more time

Last night the People’s History Museum became the latest in a line of organisations to be associated with Jeremy Deller’s Procession – the 2009 Manchester International Festival commission that sought to bring together people across Greater Manchester by taking over Deansgate for a bizarre hybrid event that brought together an American Style Parade with the Northern tradition of the Whit Walks.

The 2004 Turner Prize winner was back in town to launch the Cornerhouse books Procession publication that will imminently be available online, in their own bookshop and possibly via other good arts literature merchants.

I got the chance to catch a quick interview with Mr Deller to see what his thinking was behind the parade and what he thought the impact of the event had been, before bringing him down by asking about what his outlook is for the arts now that all the money’s gone. As ever you can listen here.

While Deller’s connection with the legacies of the project seem focussed on recording with Steel Harmony (who also got the well deserved opportunity to perform with Hot Chip at Glastonbury this year as a result of their Procession appearance), it’s fair to say the original event ignited something, for a moment, in the gathered people of Greater Manchester.  Not least with the City Council who made a wholesale carbon copy of the idea with this years inaugural Manchester Day Parade.

Deller’s original proved to be a wonderfully bizarre experience that whipped up people into a state of excitement and anticipation, only to leave them somewhat confused as to how to behave once the parade had passed – a state enhanced by the fact that the collection of heavily branded outlets normally attracted by such a public project were conspicuous in their absence.  It was in this disoriented moment of post-paradus, without a fully realised retail or commecrial agenda to pick up the pieces, that the intrinsic Britishness of the spectators came out as they returned to their inconspicuous meanderings and browsings socially encoded into how one experiences the city centre.  I can’t help but think that anywhere else in the world this would have led to people mingling with others that had just engaged in the same unusual shared experience and perhaps embrace the opportunity to make new friends, but unfortunately, through engrained habit, the opportunity was lost.

Somehow I can’t see this beautiful state of flux being allowed to remain, and perhaps eventually provide a space to change public behaviour for the better, in future iterations of the Manchester Day parade if it is to be considered sustainable by a cash-strapped council.  Sad really.  I just hope they start to include Shriners.

Jeremy Deller’s Process (ISBN 9780955047848) is available now from Cornerhouse publications priced £12.95.