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Cosey Fanni Tutti and COUM Transmissions: “I had to fight my way through everything”
Formed in Hull in the late 1960s, COUM Transmissions – members of which would later become Throbbing Gristle – pushed performance art to the limit, culminating in the 1976 ‘Prostitution’ show at the ICA which saw them vilified in the press. With a Hull City of Culture exhibition exploring the group’s legacy, Bob Dickinson speaks to founding member Cosey Fanni Tutti.
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A Q&A with… Suzanne Lacy, artist and social activist
As part of the Super Slow Way programme in Lancashire, Los Angeles-based artist Suzanne Lacy is bringing the local community together through Sufi chanting, shape-note singing and a banquet for 500 people. Bob Dickinson finds out more.
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Rogue Studios: can artists still afford to live and work in Manchester city centre?
As the search continues for a new home to house Rogue Artists’ Studios, Bob Dickinson visits a show of work by 11 of the building’s 100-plus artists and asks where next for artists in Manchester’s fast-changing city centre.
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British Ceramics Biennial 2015: a tale of regeneration and loss in the Potteries
The fourth British Ceramics Biennial in Stoke-on-Trent comes as the industry in the city is enjoying a modest upturn. Reporting from the city, Bob Dickinson finds plenty of evidence of ceramic creativity alongside well-founded concerns over the loss of traditional industrial skills.
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MIF 2015: Richter / Pärt – a moving and surprising experience
Following an introduction by Manchester International Festival Director Alex Poots and its Artistic advisor Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2013, artist Gerhard Richter and composer Arvo Pärt were inspired to make new work dedicated to each other. Bob Dickinson attended the premiére of this new collaboration at Mancheter’s renovated Whitworth, and discovered one of the highlights so far of MIF 2015.
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Manifest, Manchester: an artist-led art festival for the North West
An ambitious new artist-led festival is taking place across Manchester and Salford this weekend, with studio spaces and major venues hosting a number of projects produced especially for the festival alongside, open studios across both cities. Bob Dickinson meets artists and festival directors Elisa Artesero, John Lynch and Roger Bygott to find out more.
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MIF 2015: Tree of Codes – a mesmerising total artwork
Continuing its cross-artform commissioning process, the Manchester International Festival production Tree of Codes teams choreographer Wayne McGregor with visual artist Olafur Eliasson and musician Jamie XX. Bob Dickinson is mesmerised.
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Art in certain places: working with artists and the public in Preston
Since 2003, In Certain Places has been developing new and unusual art projects for the city of Preston. As the UCLan-backed organisation opens its doors for a short exhibition of work by four emerging artists, Bob Dickinson discovers more about its sociable approach to public art.
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New territory: Manchester’s HOME creates meeting point for the arts
As HOME, Manchester’s new space for art, theatre and cinema, fully opens to the public, Bob Dickinson looks at its place in the city’s arts ecology, the significance of its cross-disciplinary approach to commissioning, and where it sits in the city’s wider regeneration plans and the creation of a ‘northern powerhouse’.
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Whitworth Art Gallery: “It’s better than I could ever have dreamed of”
After a £15m redevelopment, Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery reopens with a stunning redesign that has doubled its size and opened it up to the public park it backs on to. All the better for displaying new shows by artists including Cornelia Parker, Sarah Lucas and Thomas Schütte, reports Bob Dickinson.
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Bury Sculpture Centre: cutbacks, controversy and town’s new art venue
The recently opened Bury Sculpture Centre is sited in two large rooms that until recently were part of the Lancashire town’s central library. But while the move has prompted protests from local people, the centre’s instigator insists it is not a case of library services being cut to make way for a new art space.
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FutureEverything review: City Fictions, tribal rituals and data facts
This year’s FutureEverything in Manchester included an art programme looking at the role of technology in the cities of the future, and exploring how mass data gathering and surveillance is affecting our lives. Bob Dickinson reports from the festival’s ‘pop-up urban experiment’.