‘HANS’ Launch at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
Hallo, its Sandra here from Friction Arts. Our opening event at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery for ‘Heard and Not Seen’ went very well and a big thank you to Mohsin Abbas of the International Ramadan Festival, one of our partners, for his opening address. Very impassioned and we will be audio streaming some of this speech soon. There are also pictures below of the event. A great turn out from stakeholders, community members, participants, funders alike. The feedback, written and verbal was as ever, very positive and ‘thought provoking’; echoing the success and engagement with the audience at our previous outing at the Mailbox.
As some of you may be aware we have attracted a lot of press attention for our ‘Heard and Not Seen’ project, which is currently on at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. We will be on Midlands Today at 6.30pm today 14th of July.
For those many of you whom have been involved you will know that some of the press coverage has distorted what is, for us, colleagues, participants, a very important project that promotes conversation.
For those of you who haven’t been involved, or visited the exhibition yet we look forward to meeting you and finding out your thoughts and responses to the exhibition. There are a number of ways of doing this. You can log in here at the website and let us know, post queries or stories. There is also a visitors book at the Exhibition site, which is gallery 36 in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. In the exhibition itself are ribbons on one of the sculptures and people are invited to write thoughts, questions and we will regularly up date these to the website to continue conversations beyond the gallery and across the globe. There are also facilitated discussions available for groups and individuals – on Wednesdays at 11.30 – meet in the exhibition – we will then provide the tea and buns and the space for new people of different faiths and cultures to meet and discuss contemporary concerns about religions, faiths and spirituality. You can book here on the website and it is free.
You will also have an opportunity to see our headlines in the exhibition itself. One of the sculptures is dedicated to ‘media noise’ as people continual emphasise that polarised press impact and distort access to honest debate and understanding.
The press coverage is National which is great – this will enable more people to engage with the project and increase the opportunities for real dialogue to take place.
We look forward to seeing or hearing from you – we have at least four other projects on the go at the moment, notably peace campaigner Isaura Mendes from Boston with us for two weeks from Thursday. Do check out our main website www.frictionarts.com and join us on the 22nd of July at our HQ, The Edge to discuss ‘how do we create a future for our children free of violence’.
regards Sandra, Lee, Mitra and Zara.
The lovely photos are by Jasroop Kaur Grewal
2 commentsExhibition Launch at BMAG – 12/07/2010
We’re delighted to announce the opening of Heard And Not Seen at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery on Monday 12th July at 6pm. Please join us for conversation in Gallery 36 on floor 3 of the Museum. We are pleased to announce that the project will be launched by Mohsin Abbas, director of the Ramadan Festival, alongside the artists, Mitra Memarzia and Sandra Hall. Unfortunately, due to staff shortages at the gallery, we were unable to open the gallery as intended on Saturday the 10th, though we have been assured that this problem will be resolved by the end of this week. Apologies for anyone who has made the journey to see the exhibition and been disappointed. If you did so, please let us know and we will send you a free copy of the exhibition catalogue by way of apology. Heard And Not Seen will be open from Saturday 17th of July at 10am.
The exhibition runs until 22nd of August, usual gallery opening times apply.
No commentsTowards more conversation
Well, we’re gearing up for another outing for ‘Heard And Not Seen’ at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in July. The excitement is growing as we re-engage and continue to interrogate these important questions. There are still far too few opportunities for people to have conversations about these important issues. Is this a conspiracy to keep us from coming together? Or is it just that artists and the media avoid engaging with these questions for fear of incurring the wrath of people with a more fundamentalist approach to Islam? It is more important than ever that people from different communities find ways to celebrate their shared humanity, rather than focussing on their differences, and it is for this reason that we have continued to develop this project. Let’s keep asking those ‘difficult’ questions, let’s demystify our cultures and learn to live together as we know we really should – in mutual respect and love, whatever our race, religion or cultural background. Let’s all be heard AND seen!
Summer 2009
Well, it’s been a little quiet here whilst we work on our other projects over at Friction Arts. We haven’t finished with Heard and not Seen, not by a long chalk and are continuing to refine and develop the project, even if it is not ‘in major’ at the moment. We are currently developing a kind of tool kit for workshops relating to the themes of the project and hope to be using it with schools and community groups in the Spring. We have also secured another outing for the exhibition of Heard and Not Seen, this time at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery during Spring 2010. Watch this space for full details nearer the time. We will be holding facilitated discussions during the show, so keep checking back, we will be booking spaces from next March.
We’ll also be updating this website more regularly from January 2010 as we head towards the exhibition and always welcome comments or questions from website visitors, just comment or contact us.
Exhibition Closed – For Now
Sadly, but temporarily, the Heard And Not Seen exhibition has closed. Thanks to everyone that came along and suported the project, it’s been fantastic. If you didn’t manage to make it along, there will be further chances to see the exhibition next year as we tour it to a range of places, from small community venues to galleries and museums. Keep checking the exhibition page for details of future opportunities to see the show, where you can also get a taste of the exhibition through photographs and film documentation. There’s currently a an excellent documentary film by a student, Cherrelle, who interviewed Sandra whilst the exhibition was on. We’ll be uploading much more soon, but do try and come along and see the show next time, even if you have seen it before, as each incarnation will be different as the audience and website community feed into it. Thanks again to everyone who supported and assisted on the production of the first outing of Heard And Not Seen, especially the excellent volunteer invigilation team, the crew, the artists, supporters and funders, the people who attended the discussion groups, and the participants of interviews and workshops.
Last chance to see the exhibition!
Welcome to the ‘Heard and Not Seen’ blog and website. ‘Heard and Not Seen’ is an arts project by Sandra Hall and Mitra Memarzia supported by Friction Arts. The project aims to create a unique, safe space for people to meet and ask questions with each other, of each other; particularly about faith, religion and spirituality. More details about the project can be found here.
There’s only a few days left, the show closes on Friday the 28th at 7pm, so if you haven’t seen the exhibition, get yourself down to level three of the Mailbox and grab a look. The show will be touring next year, so if you can’t make it, keep checking back here and we’ll let you know when there’ll be another chance to see the exhibition.
We’ve had a great time so far, with a huge range of people attending the show, interested parties and Mailbox shoppers. The facilitated discussions have been a resounding success and have been great at giving people the opportunities to talk and ask questions of each other that we always intended for the project, the opportunity to be seen AND heard…
Exhibition Now Open!
Welcome to the ‘Heard and Not Seen’ blog and website. ‘Heard and Not Seen’ is an arts project by Sandra Hall and Mitra Memarzia supported by Friction Arts. The project aims to create a unique, safe space for people to meet and ask questions with each other, of each other; particularly about faith, religion and spirituality. More details about the project can be found here.
So the exhibition launch was last night and was a resounding success. It was a great turnout, with over 200 people coming through the doors. Councillor Rudge gave a great speech, followed by our own Sandra Hall, welcoming the audience to the celebration of all the great things that have already been achieved by the project, and it’s only the beginning. The audience had a great time, there were all kinds of people there, definately not the usual arts audience, there were kids running about, ‘suits’, police, representatives from the bbc and a great cross-section of the Brummie community. I’ll be posting images of the exhibition on the appropriate page in a couple of days, as well as some more audio on the interviews page, so keep checking back.
We’d like to thank everyone who came to the launch, but we’d also like to urge them to return at a quieter time – there were so many people attending it was very difficult to get a real look at the work on offer! We’re all really pleased with the way the exhibition is looking in its current incarnation and a special thanks has to go to the Mailbox for taking the risk of showing the work, when many traditional arts spaces would not.
The show runs daily (including Sundays) until the 28th of November, so we hope to see you there.
1 commentSneak Preview of the exhibition
Welcome to the ‘Heard and Not Seen’ blog and website. ‘Heard and Not Seen’ is an arts project by Sandra Hall and Mitra Memarzia supported by Friction Arts. The project aims to create a unique, safe space for people to meet and ask questions with each other, of each other; particularly about faith, religion and spirituality. More details about the project can be found here.
We got down to the space to test out the installations today – and we were not disappointed. We managed to get the layout of the space sorted out and pretty much had the structures where they will be in the final show next week. Darren Joyce got to test out our surround sound system for the audio environment he has created for the project and we were all impressed with the result. There’s a great sense of being somewhere else which Darren manages to engender in the listener, with a layered, moving soundscape that is at once familiar and comfortingly strange.
Sneak preview - with adjustments!
Had to obscure the structures in the photos – you wouldn’t need to come to the exhibition if I didn’t!
We also got our first look at some of Steve Carson’s amazing, responsive video projections – it was fantastic seeing the films and interviews with people around the space and incredible being able to interact with them. We are all even more excited about the exhibition and really looking forward to seeing everyone else get a chance to join in.
Here’s Mitra talking about the exhibition:
Heard and Not Seen – Latest news
Heard and Not Seen news 24th October
Its all systems go at HANS HQ as we move into the final stages, before the launch of the exhibition on 7th of November. The technical aspects are being finalised with Steve Carson putting the finishing touches to the responsive video pieces and Darren Joyce working on the audio environment – meanwhile Lee is running around making sure we have all the right technical equipment ready in time for testing the whole thing out. For the rest of us its the usual accellerating experience as we dive headlong into the last two weeks. As well as putting the exhibition together there’s all the marketing and PR to do, to make sure we get our message across, event planning and logistics and just plain old putting food on the table (when we remember to eat). We’re looking for volunteers to help with the event – both in the set up and to invigilate the exhibition, so if you can spare us some time and energy, please get in touch with Sandra at sandra@livearts.co.uk – we’d be glad of the help!
Countdown to the Exhibition
It’s only a few weeks to go until the launch of the exhibition at the Mailbox, on November 7th. We’re all getting very excited and the creative team are beavering away to make what promises to be a very special, stunning piece of artwork. Please make sure you don’t just come to the launch party, the show will be well worth a visit at a quiet time, when you can really enjoy the contemplative nature of the artwork on offer. Hope to see you there.
Photography workshop 20th September
We’d like to thank everyone who came to the Mailbox, Birmingham, unit 183, between 10.00am and 3pm last weekend to have their photograph taken. Some of these photos will appear in the exhibition ‘Heard and Not Seen’ in November. We had a great time on the day and took hundreds of photographs of dozens of people from all walks of life – a great addition to the interactive nature of the project. We’re looking forward to seeing these photographs appear in the final exhibition – and hope those who participated are too!
Interactive Arts Exhibition. ‘Heard and Not Seen’ is an interactive, art exhibition taking place at the Mailbox 7th – 28th November 2008. Opening times 10.00am – 6pm Monday to Wednesdays, 10.00am – 7pm Thursday to Saturday, 11.00am – 5pm Sundays. To be part of a round table discussion in the event please see here.
Installation Structures - Watch this space!