CUBE celebrates its 11th year by continuing to showcase cutting edge projects that explore the Urban Built Environment. Building on our well established reputation fusing together architecture, contemporary art and design.

Curated by CUBE the project aims to showcase 'alternative' ways the city can be used as a gymnasium. 5 International artists explore this theme in a playful and performative way.

Artists:

Lottie Child, Street Training Manchester

Often inviting individuals to collaborate with her research, devising participatory, live-art explorations of public space, Child is interested in the way in which we behave. How we negotiate the urban landscape and how we use our instinctive behaviours while we make and refrain from spontaneous urban interventions. Recent projects include those exhibited at Tate Britain and South London Gallery.

Peter Liversidge, Perfect Match

Peter Liversidge creates work in a diverse range of media, including drawing, performance, installation, photography, painting, sculpture, artist's books and multiples such as The Perfect Match.
While his work has an assured lightness of touch and a quiet poeticism, there is also an underlying streak of dark, absurdist humour. Liversidge often approaches everyday objects with a sideways glance; exploring the bounds of our imagination and the gulf between expectation and reality; appropriating and transforming quotidian objects through the most minimal of gestures.

Tsui Kuang-Yu, Liverpool Top 9

Kuang-Yu works mostly in video and installation, using the body as an active medium in order to create meaning and action. His short films show him producing small, repetitive and seemingly senseless acts, in order to investigate the body’s relationship to the environment. Tsui represented Taiwan at the 2005 Venice Biennale.

Neville Gabie, Playing Away

Neville’s work consists of various forms from sculpture to film and photography. He is focused on responding to locations which are in a state of social or physical flux. Such projects are usually developed over sustained periods of involvement with the sites and other creative professionals. Neville has widely exhibited around the world, including Tate Modern, London. His most recent projects include artist in residence, Broadmead redevelopment, Bristol.

MediaShed (David Valentine), Duellists

Valentine is a film maker who experiments with new technologies. ‘The Duellists’ is filmed using only the CCTV network of 160 cameras in the Manchester Arndale shopping centre, where two males are caught battling each other within the deserted building. Originally made for the Futuresonic Festival, 2007 the film has become one of the best known CCTV movies ever made and won the audience third prize at the Sidewalk Cinema Festival.

'Standing the City on its Head' Education Workshops

The City As Gymnasium exhibition will form the basis of the projects in which young people will learn creatively about the urban environment. The workshops will respond to the way young people navigate around the city by adapting the urban environment around them, in different ways than those intended by designers and street planners.

These workshops will appeal to all 11-14 year olds who have as wider interests as possible ranging from astronomy through sport on to zoology and the zodiac!

The workshops will be based at CUBE in Manchester during September 2009 and they will be organised with the schools on weekdays or Saturdays to fit in with the school timetable and student availability. There is no charge for the workshops.

We ask that schools confirm their wish to be involved in the project by email to jpbplace@yahoo.com before Tuesday 30^th June.

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