Events

Ikon Gallery

Ikon

23 May - 19 July 2007

Venue: Ikon Eastside, 68–70 Heath Mill Lane, Birmingham B9 4AR
http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk

Box Office: 0121-248-0708

Ikon is an internationally acclaimed contemporary art venue located in Birmingham. It is an educational charity and works to encourage public engagement with art through exhibiting new work in a context of debate and participation. Birmingham’s Eastside district is undergoing a period of cultural regeneration, in which Ikon plays a crucial role. This year, the gallery’s Eastside programme takes place in an atmospheric disused factory and has moved from the abandoned chapel that it occupied previously.A wide range of work, including film, video, sculpture and large-scale installation will be shown throughout the summer until mid-October 2007.

Gary Stevens – Wake Up and Hide
Ikon Eastside, 68–70 Heath Mill Lane, Birmingham B9 4AR
23 May – 30 June, Wednesday – Saturday, 1–5pm
To celebrate the launch of the new Eastside exhibition space and exciting summer programme, Ikon presents Wake Up and Hide by British artist Gary Stevens.

Wake Up and Hide is a playful video installation that responds to sounds made by the audience. Comprising two videos in a dual screen projection, each piece shows footage featuring a group of actors in the same interior, a space reminiscent of a drawing room in a stately home. On one screen, the performers can be seen furtively entering the frame from beneath tables and behind curtains, only to scurry away quickly back into hiding when
the viewer makes a sound. On the other screen, the performers are stationary to begin with and if uninterrupted for long enough, they slump to the point of wilting completely. If a member of the audience breaks the silence, this relaxation ends and the actors return to their original positions, bolt upright.

Jacques Nimki – Florilegium
Ikon Eastside. 68–70 Heath Mill Lane, Birmingham B9 4AR
23 May – 30 June, Wednesday – Saturday, 1–5pm
Jacques Nimki’s practice involves the use of wild plants to communicate ideas about environmental and cultural issues. He adapts archaic processes more commonly associated with the Victorian era of exploration and collection, analysing urban plant life, like a botanist, but in a deliberately unscientific way. Nimki returns to Ikon to create Florilegium, an indoor meadow of the kind of plants that grow in the neglected and hidden areas of
Birmingham’s Eastside district. The artist has researched and catalogued these specimens and is producing a large field in the disused factory that Ikon is occupying. The planned rejuvenation of Eastside has provided the focus for this project.

Once the city’s industrial heartland, it is now the home of empty buildings and dilapidated
warehouses. Florilegium invites the viewer to consider that which is often overlooked and widely regarded as worthless or insignificant.

Please Excuse our Appearance
Ikon Eastside, 68–70 Heath Mill Lane, Birmingham B9 4AR
20 – 30 June, Wednesday – Saturday, 1–5pm
Please Excuse our Appearance is a two week artists’ residency. Artists from Birmingham, Mexico and the Netherlands explore their ongoing concern with architecture and its impact on everyday life. Ikon Eastside functions as an active working space for the participants and a public face for the project in which visitors can access a changing display of drawings, photographs, notes and other documentation produced by the group as
part of their research process. At key intervals, the venue will also be used to host presentations, talks and events, including walking tours. The project will spill outside, infiltrating the public spaces around Digbeth through a series of small scale interventions. Artists include Karin Kilberg and Reuben Henry (Springhill Institute), Marjolijn Dijkman and Maarten Van den Eynde (Enough Room for Space) and Julio Castro, Gabriel Cázares
and Rolando Flores (Tercerunquinto).

How to Improve the World
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is presenting How to Improve the World, during 26 May – 2 September 2007, an exhibition celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Arts Council Collection which features work by Roger Hiorns, Julian Opie and Richard Deacon amongst others. Ikon is hosting a number of performances in connection with the exhibition.

Jeremy Deller Acid Brass
Ikon Eastside, 68–70 Heath Mill Lane, Birmingham B9 4AR
Friday 25 May 2007, 8pm
Turner Prize winning artist Jeremy Deller’s Acid Brass is a presentation of acid house anthems performed by a brass band. This piece is followed by a party to celebrate the launch of Ikon Gallery’s Eastside exhibition space.

Brian Catling The Rail
Ikon Eastside, 68–70 Heath Mill Lane, Birmingham B9 4AR
Thursday 12 July, 6pm
Poet and performance artist Brian Catling makes emotionally charged work that collides the
mysterious with the everyday, the violent with the enigmatic and conjuring with execution. The Rail is a new 30 minute performance made for Ikon Eastside, drawing some of its references from the atmospheric interior of the disused factory. The Rail will be a combination of physical gesture and mechanical threat, with all other detail or description of the work is being kept concealed until the night of the performance.

Ryan Gander Loose Associations
Ikon Eastside, 68–70 Heath Mill Lane, Birmingham B9 4AR
Thursday 19 July, 6pm
Loose Associations is a touring lecture presented in person by the artist Ryan Gander. In some ways it sits on the brink between lecture, performance and presentation although its format and consistency is reminiscent to that of a conversation amongst friends around a table in a pub – that is to say its subject roams aimlessly, linked only by seemingly
trivial facts. This event is free but please book a place by contacting Ikon on tel. 0121 248 0708.