Friday, 16 March 2012
CUBE, ‘centre for the urban built environment’. This space is very proudly the only centre for art, architecture and design exhibitions in the Northwest. Sleek, white, modern, and functional, its identity is unsurprisingly bound up in this edifice and its location. Fittingly, the current Junebum Park commission currently showing is based on the Korean artist’s personal experiences in Manchester, and also rests on the actual building itself. Yet, contrary to (some) expectations for ‘sleek and modern’, Park seeks to introduce a playful element to something as potentially stern as a city front. Of equal import, CUBELab artists, Julia Münz and Annika Unterburg bring us Seedbank for Treehouse. A blend of architectural prowess and childlike fantasy, the Venn diagram circles of which overlap at obsession. AND you get a party bag to take home, no cake, but a potential treehouse for personal use. The Bauhaus of Manchester, with a sense of humour. You’ll be laughing all the way home.
Junebum Park: To let, 02/09-05/10
CUBELab: Julia Münz and Annika Unterburg, 02/09-05/10
Junebum Park 'To Let' 2011
Manchesters Finest
http://www.manchestersfinest.com/arts/galleries/junebum-park-cube/
Junebum Park is an artist based in Korea. Through a clever shift of perspective, Junebum transforms the most ordinary of environments into extraordinary scenes in which the artist’s hands interfere with the forces and currents in a way that is both comic and timely.
Parks video works have been shown internationally and we are delighted that the artist has accepted a commission for Manchester.
Junebum Park has been commissioned by CUBE to develop new work for an exhibition in its main gallery, opening on the 2nd September and running until the 5th October. This commission will be a world premier.
This project, in collaboration with the Chinese Art centre and the Asia Triennial 2011, will for the first time directly engage with the gallery’s external grade 2 listed architecture. The artist will playfully manipulate the face of the building. This time consuming process will gradually expose and reflect impacts of the current recession.
Next year’s Cultural Olympiad could feature an installation inspired by the works of an Eighteenth century Utopian Socialist, currently on show at a Manchester’s gallery.
‘Ode to Charles Fourier, Towards a Phalanstery for Manchester’ by Nils Norman has been commissioned by the Cube Gallery, on Portland Street.
The main exhibit is a ‘walk and crawl-through climbable sculpture’. It is a work- station divided into three key areas – safe play, standard play and risky play. It includes a trampoline, a tunnel and a mushroom log.
Jane Anderson has been the Creative Director of Cube for five years. She says: “We’ve been interested in working with Nils Norman for a long time. This is the end of a two year conversation with him.”
She explains that the aim is to adapt and make the sculpture safe and for outdoor use in Manchester city centre.
The theme of the North West’s contribution to the Cultural Olympiad is ‘We Play’. The exhibit has proved very popular with children. Fourier is likely to have been pleased by this as he believed children were naturally industrious.
A by-product of this month’s Manchester International Festival, Jane says, is a boost in families visiting the gallery.
Nils Norman’s exhibition also includes a grid or timetable which might be suitable for a community occupying one of the Phalanstries which Fourier envisioned.
The grid subdivides the day into a number of activities such as fruit growing, apple picking, water filtration, play design and brainstorming. Participants would rise at 3.30am and go to bed at 10.30pm.
Professor Andrew Vincent is the author of Modern Political Ideologies (Blackwell-Wiley 2009). He explains that Fourier, born in 1772, believed in a society where work would become an aesthetic and sensual pleasure. No roles or tasks would be fixed and production would be for basic well-made goods to satisfy human needs.
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