Art Sheffield 16: Beatrice Gibson

16 April – 08 May
Launch event: Friday 15 April, 6 – 9pm

Free & open to all

For Art Sheffield 2016: Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange and Charm, Bloc Projects were delighted to host Beatrice Gibson’s 2014 film F for Fibonacci, which explores the tentative connection between economics, finance and 20th century avant-garde musical composition, its point of departure being William Gaddis’ epic 1975 capitalist satire JR. The novel follows an 11-year-old boy who, with the help of his school’s resident composer, creates a vast financial empire through penny stocks and postal orders. Gibson uses a moment in the novel in which a televised economics lesson and a music class are accidentally scrambled to create a film that plays with and extends both the subject matter and style of Gaddis’ work.

Art Sheffield's 2016 festival programme, entitled Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange and Charm is curated by Martin Clark, Director of Bergen Kunsthall, and runs from 16 April – 8 May 2016.

The artists are: Marie Angeletti, Charles Atlas, Michel Auder, Anna Barham, Steven Claydon, Mark Fell, Beatrice Gibson, Pat Hearn and Shelley Lake, Florian Hecker, Hannah Sawtell, Richard Sides, Paul Sietsema, Jean-Michel Wicker. Scratch video works will be shown by George Barber, Nick Cope, Jeffrey Hinton, Duvet Brothers, John Scarlett Davis, Gorilla Tapes, John Maybury, Kim Flitcroft and Sandra Goldbacher.

Conceived as an 'exploded' group show, Art Sheffield will present a carefully selected programme dedicated entirely to sound and moving image, exhibited across Sheffield's galleries, venues, industrial and urban spaces. Highlights of Art Sheffield will include three new commissions by British artists Steven Claydon, Hannah Sawtell and Richard Sides, who will each produce site-specific work. Central to the festival is a collection of rarely seen 'scratch' videos, a short-lived but influential phenomenon that emerged on the underground scene in the mid-1980s. Other works address themes around politics, economics, music, technology, the ubiquity of the Internet and the material reality of the physical world.

The title, Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange and Charm is taken from the six flavours (or types) of quark: the elementary particles that make up every atom, and the fundamental building blocks of nature. Through film, video and sound, the fabric of the city itself will be explicitly activated and inhabited by the exhibition dispersed in and around Sheffield city centre.

Art Sheffield 2016 draws on the various political, social, cultural and material histories of Sheffield in order to address more universal themes. These include the city's prosperous industrial past built around manufacturing, steel and light industry, and its rapid decline in the 1980s; Sheffield's long history of resistance, socialism and independence - from John Ruskin's utopian initiatives for workers in the 19th century, through to its present as one of the UK's longest-standing Labour strongholds; and its proud musical heritage which includes bands such as Cabaret Voltaire, Human League and Pulp. The 1980s were defined by industry decline and the Thatcherite politics that accelerated it, the cold war, nuclear threat and the boom and bust of burgeoning global capitalism. At this time, new video editing technologies became available at various arts schools, including Sheffield, leading to a number of artists and musicians experimenting with the medium in very politically engaged ways. This led to the development of a new visual language and technique – 'scratch video'.

Using rapid cuts and repetitions, as well as new digital effects, this work was often screened in clubs or music venues, or made as stage visuals or music videos for bands. Art Sheffield includes a number of these rarely seen 'scratch' videos by filmmakers including George Barber, Nick Cope, Jeffrey Hinton, Duvet Brothers, John Scarlett Davis, Gorilla Tapes, John Maybury, Kim Flitcroft and Sandra Goldbacher. In the way their work very directly sampled and subverted found footage from TV news, films, advertising and popular culture, they can be seen to have anticipated many of the techniques and visual languages that are now so ubiquitous across the internet, social media and platforms like YouTube. Scratch Video is presented in association with LUX and the BFI National Archive, as part of major touring film project THIS IS NOW: FILM AND VIDEO AFTER PUNK.

The city-wide programme has been developed and delivered in collaboration with Sheffield's leading visual arts venues - Bloc Projects, S1 Artspace, Museums Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam University and Site Gallery. In addition, a number of off-site venues have been very specifically selected – including former steel and cutlery works, nightclubs, and the iconic Park Hill, a controversial brutalist housing estate and now the largest listed building in Europe. Shown alongside the scratch videos, the contemporary works demonstrate and develop similar ideas and attitudes, still as politically and aesthetically relevant today: from an interest in the sub-atomic reality of the physical world to new economic models and patterns of risk; from virtual and constructed realities to the subversion and distribution of open source digital tools; from the politics of neo-liberal capitalism to communities created through music, labour and resistance.

Throughout Art Sheffield 2016, video, film and sound are explored in their various material forms, on the one hand as a mechanical, digital or virtual medium, but on the other as kind of collective unconscious or reverie, evoking the past only to reflect on the current state of Britain today and our saturated and fragmentary internet-state-of-mind. In this way the exhibition is both framed by, and assimilated into, the city – a place defined as much by its cultural production as it is by its material industry; by individuals and communities as much as infrastructure and architecture; a construction and a fantasy that is constantly being reproduced and reinvented – projected back out onto itself by the various forces, desires, processes and people that both inhabit and imagine it.