Digbeth First Friday welcomes the beginning of autumn with a wonderful array of new exhibitions, performances, poetry and food. Start off at A3 Project Space to see Amanda Holiday’s collection of 50 dinner plate collages, and then drop in to Digbeth Community Gardens Pop-up Poetry Café for food, words, music and drinking.
Over at Minerva Works there are new residency and exhibition openings from Stryx, Grand Union and Vivid Projects. Art organisations Centrala and HFWAS will be working with Art in Crisis, which highlights artists at work in Crisis Skylight studios across the UK, to produce new installations and nomadic performances.
Discover the fantastic independent culture Digbeth has to offer this Friday!
On offer this month:
A3 Project Space: din din by Amanda Holiday, 12–7pm
Exhibition of 50 wall-mounted dinner plate collages by Amanda Holiday that tell a fiction of modern eating played out in an age of austerity & food-banks. Each plate is £150 with 20% donated to SIFA Fireside in Digbeth to support the provision of free meals.
Digbeth Community Garden: Pop-up Poetry Café, 6–10pm
The Real Junk Food Project and Naked Lungs have combined to create an evening of food, words, music and drinking. Food will be provided as always by the lovely people at TRJFPB and will be on a strictly pay as you feel basis.
Centrala: Art in Crisis and J Dubulu, 6–11pm
This month Centrala collaborate with Crisis, presenting specially prepared for Centrala light-box installation. Afterwards their special guest J Dubulu- UK based beat conductor will create a special live music performance. This will be an unusual performance linking film and music, along with live visuals created by Parallax.
Grand Union: Emma Hart exhibition opening, 6–8pm
Join Grand Union from 6–8pm for the launch of our new exhibition, big Mouth, a new collection of ceramic sculptures by Emma Hart that want to tell you how it really is and how it really feels.
HFWAS: Performance for Art in Crisis, 5.30–6.30pm
HFWAS will be joining forces with Crisis Skylight at next Digbeth First Friday for Art In Crisis, a nationwide event. The performance consists of participants from HFWAS, Crisis Skylight Birmingham and Vicki Ayers body percussion and will travel from the Rhubarb building in Digbeth at around 5.30pm, and move to Digbeth Dining Club and then on to Minerva Works, stopping at Centrala and Grand Union.
Stryx: Soup: PTII, 6.30–8.30pm
Soup: PTII is an interdisciplinary artist residency based at Stryx, Birmingham. The residency awards emerging artists in the West Midlands the opportunity to work for 8 weeks in the heart of Digbeth, giving artists uninterrupted time and space to develop their projects.
Vivid Projects: Repeater: Material World, 6.30–9pm
Cutting and conflating sound, text and image, Repeator, a collaborative working process between artists Laurence Price and Cathy Wade. With mobile phone footage captured in the shopping centres and streets of Birmingham, Material World explores our engagement with space and commercial architecture and the endless cycle of consumption and waste in our ‘terial, a material, a material, a material world.
- A3 Project Space: Unit A3, 2 Bowyer Street, B10 0SA, 12–7pm
- Digbeth Community Garden: 54-57 Allison Street, Digbeth, B5 5TH, 6–10pm
- Centrala: Unit 4, Minerva Works, 158 Fazeley Street, B5 5RT, 6–11pm
- Grand Union: Unit 19, Minerva Works, 158 Fazeley Street, B5 5RS. 6–8pm
- HFWAS: Rhubarb building, Digbeth and Minerva Works, 5.30–6.30pm
- Stryx: Unit 13, Minerva Works, 158 Fazeley Street, B5 5RS, 6.30–8.30pm
- Vivid Projects: Unit 16, Minerva Works, 158 Fazeley Street, B5 5RS, 6.30–9pm
– Digbeth First Friday launched in May 2014 and takes place on the First Friday of each month. The next event will be on 2 October 2015.
– Digbeth First Friday is produced by a group of Digbeth-based arts organisations who are working together to create a critical mass of events and allow visitors to discover the exciting independent culture this unique part of Birmingham offers.
www.digbethfirstfriday.com