Major Asian Art Triennial opens this month

IN just a fortnight, the Asia Triennial Manchester 2014 will open, showcasing some of the foremost contemporary visual art from across the globe.

A major initiative of MIRIAD, Manchester School of Art’s innovative research centre, Asia Triennial Manchester 2014 is a festival of visual culture that will feature a series of powerful exhibitions, commissions, and creative interventions by artists who live in, work in or address issues surrounding Asia.

The only Asian Art Triennial outside the Asia Pacific region, the event returns to Manchester for a third time from September 27 to November 23.

Taking as its theme Conflict and Compassion, ATM14 will investigate whether the role of the 21st century artist or curator may be, in part, to provide a voice for the unheard, a message to the dominant, or even to demonstrate some kind of sympathetic vision of values through the visual.

Festival of visual culture

Curated by Alnoor Mitha, MIRIAD Senior Research Fellow and Artistic Director of ATM, the exhibition at IWM North will present new as well as existing work that explores the theme and interacts internally and externally with the museum’s unique collections and its distinctive Daniel Libeskind designed building.

Sited at IWM North (part of Imperial War Museums), Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester Craft and Design Centre, Touchstones Rochdale, Cornerhouse, Bury Art Museum, Artwork, The John Rylands Library, Manchester Cathedral, Museum of Science & Industry, National Football Museum and locations across Manchester Metropolitan University’s campus, the Triennial will present new site-specific work alongside existing pieces not seen before in the UK.

For the very first time, Asia Triennial Manchester also includes a business conference on November 6, which will focus on the Design & Digital sector (Smart Cities), promoting Manchester’s ambition to become one of the world’s leading digital cities and exploit its global links for greater economic impact.

Art’s “crucial role”

Exhibiting artists include Aman Mojadidi, an American artist of Afghan descent known for his public, site-specific art projects. Mojadidi moved to Afghanistan in 2003 where he has been active in Kabul’s art scene and has been credited for playing a crucial role in its resurgence.

Afghani street artist Shamsia Hassani’s newly commissioned graffiti art will transform the exterior spaces of IWM North. Her working methods reflect the challenges she faces everyday in Kabul.

She said: “If you stand in the street, you face problems; because of this I started a new style of graffiti. I take pictures of places I like in the city, open them in Photoshop, and do digital designs. Or I print out a picture of the street and then do graffiti with a paintbrush. If you scan it back, it looks like real graffiti, but of course it isn’t.”

Alinah Azadeh is a British artist of Iranian heritage, whose large-scale installations encompass ritual, textile, sculpture, the digital and writing, often involving the public in their materialisation. She will create a new sculptural installation rooted in the idea of revolution, influenced by her own experiences and those of local communities who have themselves, or their parents and grandparents, been displaced by conflict. In tandem with this she will bring her Book of Debts to IWMN, the core of her live national touring project, Burning The Books, with a focus on debt, conflict and resolution.

What is a conflict?

Hamra Abbas is a Kuwaiti artist who lives and works in Boston and Lahore. Drawing upon culturally loaded imagery and iconography, in an often-playful manner, Abbas appropriates and transforms traditional motifs and styles to examine questions of conflict within society. Abbas will make two new works to be displayed at the Manchester School of Art, Lessons of Love (extended) and Monument, which will be a series of prints.

Nalini Malani’s In Search of Vanished Blood for Documenta 2012 was inspired by the literary including an Urdu poem translated by Faiz Ahmed Faiz as well as writings by Christa Wolf and Rainer Maria Rilke; each concerned with the status of women in Indian society. Malani will show a single video presentation at one of the IWM North silos together with two-dimensional work, transforming the space into an emotive experience for the viewer.

Sophie Ernst is a Dutch video artist based in the UK. In her work, Ernst follows the idea of projection in relation to space, architecture, culture, history, and identity. She is concerned with political turmoil and displacement, with individual memories of home and ideal places. She is currently exploring the archives at IWM North archives to produce a new sculptural piece for ATM14 that asks, what is a conflict?

Bashir Makhoul’s project raises questions about the kinds of spectral spaces that emerge in sites of conflict. He examines the interactions and confusions between the virtual and the real, such as the mock cities built for training in urban warfare, the parallel world of surveillance, or CAD inspired urban developments. Makhoul’s new edition of his series Enter Ghost Exist Ghost installation will occupy the Museum’s spectacular Air Shard.

Largest exhibition of Chinese contemporary art

Informed by his varied cultural heritage, Shezad Dawood works across film, painting and sculpture to juxtapose systems of image, language, site and historical narrative.

Appropriating some imagery relating to ancient magical systems and feminine cults of the ancient world and particularly Babylonia and Iraq, Dawood is presenting a new installation combining vintage killims and video projection responding to one of the big tanks in the museum’s main space.

The Centre For Chinese Contemporary Art is to stage the largest exhibition of Chinese contemporary art in the UK to date. It will feature over 30 major artists from Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and, exhibiting across six key spaces in Manchester including ArtWork, The John Rylands Library, Manchester Cathedral, Museum of Science & Industry and National Football Museum.

Responding to the ATM14 theme, CFCCA’s curatorial team led by Jiang Jiehong, Professor of Chinese Art at Birmingham City University and a former curator of Guangzhou Biennale, has focused on China’s current socio-economic vision, which seemingly presents ‘no conflict’ but rather, almost poetically, a ‘Harmonious Society’.
Artists including Taiwan’s Chen Chieh-Jen and China’s Xu Zhen have developed new work in response to this era of unprecedented social, ideological and cultural transformation or are presenting work never before shown in the UK.

High calibre of artists

Asia Triennial Manchester’s past success is demonstrated by the calibre of the artists involved previously including Subodh Gupta (ATM08) and Rashid Rana (ATM11). Now located within MIRIAD at Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University, ATM contributes strongly to Manchester’s ambitions to be a ‘Culturally Distinctive’ and ‘Culturally Connected’ city with an international reputation for its arts and culture.

ATM has attracted over 350,000 visitors with more than 7.5 million viewing public realm work. ATM brought together six venues in 2008, increasing to 18 in 2011 including non-traditional arts spaces such as Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics and Manchester Cathedral plus collaborations with four universities.

ATM has delivered 58 new visual art and craft commissions, performances and film, exhibited over 380 days, featuring 52 non-UK and 50 UK artists. It has always attracted established and emerging Asian artists at the forefront of their careers to the UK. The trailblazing Rusholme Project in 2007 created new site-specific public artworks for the first Manchester International Festival.

Full details of ATM14 events can be found at asiatriennialmanchester.com. To follow the event on social media, search Facebook for “asiatriennialmanchester” or follow @triennialmcr on Twitter.