Idea. After Hours

Title

In the second crit we came up with the title for our project. As I mentioned before our theme is about life at night.  We did not want the title to be too obvious like Nightlife, When the sun goes down, Darkness and so on. Anna mentioned that there was a festival in Manchester called After Hours and we thought that is the perfect title for our project, because it is not too obvious and still has the same meaning as life at night.

Idea

Usually I spend a long time thinking about the right idea for my projects, changing my mind every second and doubting my choices, but this time, due to the fact that we have just 6 weeks for everything, I did not think that much and decided to do the first thing that comes to my mind. I did not look far and chose the closest topic to me - student life. Most of us have been a student and knows what life they live. There is even a saying that students never sleep. I decided to show 3 ways of how students spend their night. I tried to explore procrastination, because it plays a huge part in my and a lot of other peoples life. "Some studies reported that approximately 70% of college students considered themselves procrastinators, and academic procrastination has been reported across the world."(Ji Won, 2015, 64 p.) So what people do instead of studying, what happens when the work has been left for the last minute? What students think and what they feel, do they know and feel bad that they are not doing work, do they regret their decisions? That is what I am interested in and will try to show in my images for this project.

Bibliography:

Ji Won, Y 2015, 'Examining the Effect of Academic Procrastination on Achievement Using LMS Data in e-Learning', Journal Of Educational Technology & Society, 18, 3, pp. 64-74, Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 23 February 2016.

Twenty Twenty Two

After we agreed to take this venue for our exhibition we started to think how can we use it to show our work. First of all we needed to see it. Luckily, 3rd year students had an exhibition called 'Transition' at the right time for us. So me and Abigail went down not only to look at the venue, but also to see how level 6 students exhibited their work in the same space. A few images that I took at the exhibition:

We really liked the venue, the space is perfect size for 4 people exhibition, there is a projector that we can use, speakers, spotlights to light our work. 

We were a little disappointed of the 3rd years exhibition as their just put their work up on the walls with double sticky tape, there were no description who's work or what it was about. However, they had snacks, which I think was a really good idea and we should try having them in our exhibition as well. 

Moreover, we needed to find out the exact dimensions of the place. Twenty Twenty Two had a floor plan on their website, however it is not very accurate as it does not include the walls with the tiles, where the work cannot be hang, columns or other stuff that would prevent looking at the work. 

Floor plan that they have on their website

Me and Abi went to see our venue again just this time with tape measure. We measured all the walls that can be used to hang the work we also find out that we can use nails, but we cannot drill, there is also a metal beam near one of the walls that we could use to hang our work. That is the floor plan that we made:

International Photography Festivals and Exhibitions

Foam photography gallery (Amsterdam)

It is a photography museum located in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Me and Joe Gregory had an opportunity to visit it last year.

Every year Foam organises four large exhibitions by particularly notable photographers, usually running for about three months. In conjunction about 16 shorter running exhibitions are organised by the museum, which can be very different in character: either the work of relatively young photographers, or a specific project, work that is currently relevant, small retrospectives or the presentation of new developments within the medium.

The exhibition space is interesting and a little bit confusing as we didn't know from where to start and  if I remember correctly we started from the end of exhibition, so we needed to go back. 

There was a variety of work that were displayed in different rooms. There was a room with large prints that covered all wall, dark room with images in the lightboxes and many others that looked like classical gallery rooms with framed images. On the last floor there were images for sale and some photo books. 

Photograph by Joe Gregory

Foam gallery partners and funding streams: BankGiro Loterij, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek, Delta Lloyd, Olympus, VandenEnde Foundation. http://www.foam.org/about/partners

Format festival (Derby)

Theme: Evidence

Evidence featured over 200 photographers, guest curators, interactive installations and diverse events.  The exhibitions were in different places in Derby. Below I included the map that we had to find all the places that festival took. 

It was located at the heart of Derby's city centre, so it was not hard to find everything. It included range of different buildings and all of them fit the theme 'Evidence' and were appropriate for the images the were shown in the building. Moreover, all images were nit just framed and hanged on the wall as we used to see. Pictures were mounted, framed, some of them were clipped to a strings and hanged in the middle of the room, so you could go around the image.

FORMAT is directed by Louise Clements, organised by QUAD and the University of Derby. Supported by Arts Council England, Derby City Council and multiple partners from the UK and international origins.

Look/15 (Liverpool)

Theme: Exchange 

'Exchange' explored three key topics and the regular confluences between them:

1. Migration

Migration regularly refers to people, but LOOK/15 explores the migration of communities, culture, materials, philosophies and stories, told through portraits and the impact of individuals and groups on environments and landscapes.

2. Women and photography

Often the subject of the lens and historically belittled as the domestic maintainer of family ‘keepsake’ images, women are still under-represented in the photographic industry. LOOK/15 platforms female photography from today and yesteryear, offering glimpses in to the artistic pursuits and political passions of women.

3. Memory

Photography is often an aide-mémoire by which people reflect on their history. It can also become the subject of ridicule post-factum and can take on new meaning in changing times. LOOK/15 platforms new tellings of old stories, wishes and passages and interrogates the ethics of (re)construction and archival exposition. 

Similar to Derby festival Look/15 had a lot of venues located in Liverpool city centre. 

Look/15 is delivered in partnership with Liverpool’s world-class cultural venues and teams. It showcases local and international artists.

Turn Sideways in the Wind by Ciara Leeming (Salford)

Theme: Traveling Romani people

At the beginning of this module we went to an exhibition that was held in Salford Museum and Art Gallery. It was featuring Ciara Leeming's work and her project about Roma families. There were series of portraits about people and their life. Each person had a description about their life and what they had to experience. So before looking at the portraits we were able to understand what is happening in the images. 

Images were displayed in not very usual space - on the stairs. The start of the exhibition was on the left side. It had a statement, which was written in two languages: English (because it is exhibited in England) and Romani (Because it is about Romani people). The statements and descriptions were printed on phototext paper. 

Photograph by Joseph Mulpeter 

It was a little difficult to look at the work on the stairs, because I constantly needed to be aware of stairs and make sure that I wouldn't fall down. And it made harder  for me to concentrate and look at the work. The images were framed in the black frames and had white boarders around them. They were hanged using mirror plates, which is a safest way to hang an image on the wall.

"The reason why it’s on show in Salford is simply because Salford Museum and Art Gallery have a twice a year application process for exhibitions, and I was lucky to be selected. I felt that since my work has been shot in Greater Manchester, it would be great to get the stories in front of a new local audience. "(Ciara Leeming and Redeye, 2016)   

The exhibition is publicised on numerous websites on the internet: Manchester evening news, Redeye, Salford.gov.uk, Northern Soul and others.

Paper Gallery (Manchester)

Theme: The Grand Scheme of Things


I had an opportunity to go to Paper gallery whilst is was showing work by Vincent James. The exhibition featured a variety of works inspired by Vincent’s time at PAPER: including animations, 2D work, sculpture and a large collage mural that covers most of the wall space in the gallery. Everything was created and shot in the same gallery.

Vincent James is best known for using cartoon imagery to create surreal sculptures, paintings and animations. His work draws on an ever expanding catalogue of objects appropriated from cartoons. All of his work for this exhibition was made just from paper. 

It is a mazing what you can do in a such a small room. There was so many different things, but everything followed the same theme.

The exhibition is funded by Arts Council of England through Grants for the Arts.