Six of the best put Sheffield in the picture

Sheffield opens its fifth citywide contemporary art event tomorrow, and it will showcase the work of local, national and international artists. Sheena Hastings reports.

IT'S an inspired idea – mounting a single major exhibition under one theme but spreading it across six venues around a compact city centre.

In the fifth such event to take place since 2001, organised by Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum (SCAF), very different gallery spaces –Bloc, Millennium Gallery, S1 Artspace, Site Gallery, Yorkshire Artspace and Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery – will show

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the work of 23 artists chosen by guest co-curators Netherlands-based Frederique Bergholtz and Annie Fletcher.

The title of Art Sheffield 2010 is Life: A User's Manual, and it refers to Georges Perec's 1978 novel of the same title, in which he builds up a detailed picture of the inhabitants of a single apartment block by describing spaces in which they live, the objects in their rooms and the paintings and photos on the walls.

It's all about the individual's relationship to the collective and the effects of economic and social pressures on everyday actions, attempting to grapple with global crises without being overwhemed by them. Nothing small, then.

Frederique Bergholtz says the decision to choose this particular theme came about partly because of the moment in time, 18 months ago, when she and Fletcher were invited to curate the show.

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"We were facing the credit crunch at the time, and we visited Sheffield to discuss the project. We loved the city and everything we could see and hear about its manufacturing and post-industrial history.

"It made us think of labour, including the contribution from women and the beautiful word 'affect' – people affecting one another with a feeling or emotion. In relation to art itself, 'affect' combines looking and thinking and really engaging with something."

From German artist Hito Steyerl's Red Alert, a reflection on the end of video, to Netherlands-based Wendelian van Oldenborgh's project which dwells on the "relationship of cultural production and active spectatorship", there's a lot for the contemporary art fan to chew on.

One of van Oldenborgh's pieces projects slides of a stage show mounted and toured by Belgian women who had been made redundant from a Levi's factory and who wrote a drama to tell the story.

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Among the British contingent of artists here is Susan Hiller, with her beautiful Dedicated to Unknown Artists 1972-6, an installation of 305 postcards showing views of rough seas crashing around the British coastline alongside written charts about them. The romance and drama of the often hand-tinted postcards is curiously juxtaposed

with the highly rational grids of text.

Czech artist Katerina Seda uses art to reactivate communities and creative social interaction. Her Spirit of Uhyst, 2009 is a series of 75 panels showing the progress of a work as it is added to by each one of a small community in northern Germany, using a single line to draw something that characterises the village for them. The resulting piece embraces landscape, history and many emotions in a collective act of belonging.

"There's a great deal of excitement around the show," says Jeanine Griffin, director of SCAF.

"Each of the shows we've previously done has played a part in putting Sheffield more and more on the map of contemporary art. In 2005, we started going outside of the city to invite artists to take part, and most of the work in the show has been produced specially for it.

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"At our last show, in 2008, 150,000 people visited the seven venues, and the exhibition was very well reviewed. Comments showed that people really liked the exploration of ideas and the fact that the show included local, national and international artists."

Funding the show has involved raising cash from different sources at rather a difficult time, says Griffin. "Yes, it's been tricky, but we feel we've pulled off something really special and very ambitious."

Art Sheffield 2010 Life: A User's Manual March 6-May 1. Information: 0114 281 2013/ www.artsheffield.org

Meet the Curator

Saturday, March 6, 2pm-3pm, Millennium Gallery. Join Frederique Bergholtz, one of the co-curators of Art Sheffield 2010 – Life: A User's Manual, who will give an introduction to the exhibition. Free, no booking required.

Towering work highlights the steel city

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Charlotte Morgan is 25, and one of four Sheffield-based artists chosen to exhibit work in the Art Sheffield 2010 festival.

Since graduating in Fine Art from Sheffield Hallam University in 2007, she has been working at S1 Artspace in the city. As an emerging artist, her practice does not yet pay her way, and she works part-time in an Arts Council-funded creative IT learning project.

"Although I can't make ends meet yet from my practice, I'm very lucky to be in Sheffield, where there is a big and very supportive community of artists, and the work I do alongside my art practice is important and means I can transfer skills between the two."

Like the other 22 artists invited to exhibit, Morgan was chosen because her work broadly fitted the show's theme Life: A User's Manual. Her contribution, a limited-edition "bookwork" called Lookout, comprises new and archival images and writing which explores her interest in the structure and experience of built environments and the fields of art writing and self-publishing. The book has been produced by Sheffield-based The Designers Republic.

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The work focuses on two prominent residential buildings overlooking each other on the edge of Sheffield city centre – The Velocity Tower, a controversial 22-storey new build, and the Hanover Tower, a 1960s' social housing block nearby.

"Both give panoramic views of the city, a sought-after commodity," says Morgan. "They also give a suggestion of distance, stillness and gazing, inertia, suspense and possibility....One building, the older one, came out of old ideas and idealism and the new one came out of a different kind of idealism and aspiration. No-one knows how such buildings will ultimately turn out."

Morgan's book looks at the vistas afforded by both towers, interspersed with images of other high points – watch towers, radio towers, tree houses, for example – as well as investigating the spaces between the two buildings.

Suggested route

Starting from Sheffield train station, a tour of the six venues could take a couple of hours, from The Showroom Cinema, and walking onward to the Site Gallery, Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery, Yorkshire Artspace, Sylvester Space, Bloc, S1 Artspace and finishing at the Millennium Gallery. Downloadable Audio Tours will be available as part of the show. March 13 from the Art Sheffield 2010 website (http://artsheffield.org/

artsheffield2010/)