Urban Festival of Art, Music and Ideas
13-16 May Manchester UK
http://www.futuresonic.com
Futuresonic’s 2009 art programme is more ambitious and relevant than ever. Themes include society, technology and the city plus this year Environment 2.0. The exhibition takes place across Manchester and beyond, with the focal point an exhibition at the CUBE gallery.
Kim Abeles (US)
Prayas Abhinav (IN)
Ackroyd & Harvey (UK)
Carlo Buontempo (IT)
Lluis Sabadell Artiga (ES)
Rob Bailey (UK)
Amy Balkin (US)
Mike Bennett (IE)
Jonathan Cohrs (US)
Jonah Brucker-Cohen (US)
Alfie Dennon (UK)
Yara El-Sherbini (UK)
Cleo Evans (UK)
Usman Haque (US)
Drew Hemment (UK)
HeHe (UK/FR)
Aaron Koblin (US)
Megan MacMurray (US)
James Marriott (UK)
Eva Meyer-Keller (DE)
Fujiko Nakaya (JP)
Christian Nold (UK)
Angela Pablo (US)
The Owl Project (UK)
Andrea Polli (US)
Janine Randerson (NZ)
Scenocosme (FR)
Will Schrimshaw (UK)
Royal College of Art & Yamaha
Yuri Suzuki (JP)
Elin Wikstrom (SE)
CUBE exhibition 13-23 May, opening 5pm on 13 May
All Art exhibitions and events are free
http://www.futuresonic.com/art
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Curator’s Statement
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The 2009 exhibition has grown out of three years of background work which commenced in 2006. It adds an engagement in the environment to the festival’s now perennial themes of society, technology and the city.
Artists here avoid cliches and address environmental sustainability in ways both forceful and irreverent. Eva Meyer-Keller re-enacts catastrophic weather scenarios using household objects in Handmade, and Kim Abeles’ exhibits commemorative plates with images of U.S. presidents, created by exposing the plates to an amount of smog proportional to their environmental records.
Futuresonic has developed a social engagement within its art programme, and in Beuys’ Acorns by Ackroyd and Harvey this resonates within a wider art historical tradition. Installing 250 oak saplings grown from artist Joseph Beuys’ acorns, they revisit his notion of social sculpture, where the artist is asking dangerous questions, seeking to change the social order.
The exhibition includes artworks which are purely aesthetic, such as Janine Randerson’s compelling film Rorschach Clouds, artworks which are conceived directly as social interventions, such as the urban gardening projects of Prayas Abhinav in Petpuja, as well as pieces which arise out of a sustained engagement and dialogue between artists and scientists such as the work of Andrea Polli.
A focus on participatory artworks continues, with a public recital of the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) coordinated by Amy Balkin, an art device for prospecting for oil in the city centre by Jon Cohrs, and a number of large scale, participatory mass observation projects on climate and biodiversity by Futuresonic with the Met Office and Natural History Museum.
Elin Wikstršm introduces us to wheelchair tag rugby in a conceptual art event and exhibition in which the drama and brutality of the game offers a metaphor for the invasion of non-native species of plants and animals in the year of Darwin’s bicentenary, and also a celebration of the sporting prowess of the disabled wheelchair rugby players prior to London 2012.
Several artworks make visible and tangible the outcomes of our actions at a local level, including aesthetic and conceptual design objects by Usman Haque and Megan MacMurray & Angela Pablo, and documentation of HeHe’s award winning Nuage Vert projecting energy usage onto a powerstation vapour cloud.
Across the Art Programme artists explore other themes, including a number of sound art projects, centred on an important exhibition by Yamaha and Royal College of Art. Futuresonic 2009’s focal point is, however, very much this year in seeking to open an original engagement in the environment, with projects which aim to provoke and inspire.
Drew Hemment
Artistic Director
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The Festival
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Futuresonic Urban Festival of Art, Music and Ideas features world premiers of astonishing artworks, an explosive city-wide music programme, and visionary thinkers from around the world. Now in its 14th year, Futuresonic is the UK’s leading festival for digital culture, and this year was nominated for the prestigious Lever Arts Prize. An urban festival experience, it is anticipated that over 50,000 festival visitors will engage with 300 artists and 100 events across 30 venues.
13-16 May, Manchester UK
http://www.futuresonic.com
Futuresonic is presented by FutureEverything CIC. It is a Regularly Funded Organisation (RFO) of Arts Council England North West, a pillar event of Manchester City Council and is supported by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. FutureEverything was shortlisted for the highly acclaimed 2009 Lever Prize.
Futuresonic is presented in partnership with ImaginationLancaster http://imagination.lancaster.ac.uk, a major new research lab at Lancaster University.
In 2010 Futuresonic will return as FutureEverything
#futr09
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Volunteers
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Futuresonic offers a range of opportunities to get involved through volunteering. In the lead up and during the festival this may include tasks in marketing, production, artist liason and front of house.
Get in touch if you’d like to be involved in making the festival a great success. Contact: volunteers@futuresonic.com
http://www.futuresonic.com/getinvolved
