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The image shows elements in the show Im Bau at Grand Union in 2015. It is a wide shot of a white painted gallery space, with windows across the right hand side wall. Three desks are arranged in the space. One with 35mm slides and a slide viewer on it, another has a book arranged on a foam pad with book weights. Three colourful printed fabric banners hang from the ceiling. A tri-fold screen sits to the right of the image. On the very back wall, posters hang from two sets of noticeboards. The image shows elements in the show Im Bau at Grand Union in 2015. It is a wide shot of a white painted gallery space, with windows across the back wall. Two desks are arranged in the space, one with 35mm slides and a slide viewer on it, the other with a book arranged on a foam pad with book weights. Three printed fabric banners hang from the ceiling. A tri-fold screen sits in the centre of the image, behind a pillar. On the very back wall, two black and white posters hang from a noticeboard. The image shows elements in the show Im Bau at Grand Union in 2015. It is a wide shot of a white painted gallery space, with windows across the right hand side wall. Two desks are arranged in the space, one with 35mm slides and a slide viewer on it. Three colourful printed fabric banners hang from the ceiling. A tri-fold screen sits to the right of the image. On the very back wall, posters hang from two sets of noticeboards. The image shows elements in the show Im Bau at Grand Union in 2015. A blue desk sits underneath a noticeboard, on which two posters are pinned; both are printed with spreads from AR Magazine's issue on The New Brutalism from 1955. On the desk sits a small slide viewer and a box of slides. There is a glass panel in the centre of the desk, under which is a fragment of Birmingham motorway.

Im Bau, 2015


Solo project at Grand Union, Birmingham


Im Bau was an experimental research project, commissioned by Grand Union, a gallery located in Birmingham, the second biggest city in the UK. I was invited to respond to the shifting fabric of the city of Birmingham, and to offer an artistic critique of the programme of ‘culture-led regeneration’ being imposed on the formerly industrial district in which the gallery is situated. The project was punctuated with discursive events and drew in multiple collaborators, including Geoff Bateson, a retired Urban Policy maker from Birmingham City Council and Honor Gavin, a Birmingham-born musician and the author of ‘Midland: a novel out of time’, an anarchic novel of 20th century Birmingham.

For the duration of Im Bau, the gallery held a revolving selection of curated historical materials, texts and images related laterally and literally to the cycles of demolition and reconstruction of Birmingham’s city fabric in the 20th century. The exhibition, in content and form, presented multiple, fragmentary and overlapping versions of same city. It acted both as a telescope (a viewing portal in a display panel framed a distant tower block, symbol of one stage of redevelopment) and as a microscope focusing down on granular, specific details. Archival images and documents, fragments of a long-demolished motorway and personal postcards in the exhibition became props through which viewers were invited to ascribe meanings.