Travel Stories is a collaborative project produced for Casco by Danish artist Pia Rönicke, Kurdish writer Zeynel Abidin Kizilyaprak, which thinks about the nature of how stories are shared, heard and retold. The exhibition is centered around the film Facing, which the artist and writer co-directed in Istanbul in January 2008. 

The first solo exhibition in the UK by Colombian artist Oscar Muñoz – a powerful body of work selected from the last ten years that evokes memory and loss to compelling and seductive effect.

This exhibition marks a moment in FACT’s 2008 Human Futures: my world programme where one of the world’s most
celebrated contemporary artists considers the human condition – from a conspicuously female position. Directing
and often playing the lead in her own works, Pipilotti Rist turned to the do-it-yourself medium of video because of its
closeness and intimacy with the subject. At a significant juncture in the artist’s career, as she prepares for a departure
from the gallery to the big screen of cinema, this exhibition draws together a set of the prevailing concerns within the
artist’s work to date.
With a trademark sensual slickness, her work explores ideas of fearlessness, the body, nature and spirituality. In this
UK debut of Gravity Be My Friend, the final part of a series launched to great acclaim with a site-specific
installation in a church at the 51st Venice Bienniale, she turns to the age-old religious concern of a paradise lost,
equating a global consciousness of climate change with the fall of man in the Garden of Eden.

Works by Jill Greenberg, Jessica Roberts, Edith Maybin and Jeongmee Yoon.

Public viewing times: Tuesday-Saturday 12-6pm (or by appointment)

Play is a state of mind, a place of imaginings.  When we play we exist in a state of suspension between the real and the possible.  Artists seduce the oberver's eye and the mind into joining a play already in progress.  The Gallery at O Born Contemporary provides a showcase for this exchange: our first year of programing is built upon the word play and all of its possibilities.  We take great pleasure in presenting our premier exhibition to our clients and the broader community. 

10am - 6pm (Except Mondays)

Free

Far West is an experimental project that will transform Arnolfini from an arts venue into a distinctive ‘concept store’, that explores the shifting of the economic centre of the world to the East.

The Far West concept store will provide customers with the experience of interacting with, producing, and then purchasing, a selection of specially branded products, designed by artists or inspired by artists’ projects from ornaments to music, comics, food, toys, and artworks. In the process, customers will gain an insight into the nature of economy, cultural hegemony, the history of certain products, and the marketing potential of regional identities.

Sailing to Byzantium brings together work initiated during a study trip to Istanbul undertaken by staff, students and graduates of Sir John Cass Department of Art, Media and Design, London Metropolitan University in January 2008.

The exhibition features photography, video, sculpture and drawing and reflects a veritable range of responses to this fascinating and beautiful city.

An essay by David Howells accompanies the exhibition.

Exhibition: Sailing to Byzantium
Opening Times: Monday - Friday 12 - 5pm
Admission: Free

Geometry Wars presents a new body of work, comprising twenty one paintings and two sculptures. Painted mostly in 'greyscale' and muted tones, Bolivar's palette presents a flipside to the witticism often associated with his paintings, reminding us, in the words of Peter Ustinov, that comedy is simply a funny way of beingserious.

Open Tuesday-Friday 11am-5pm, Saturday 10am-4pm.

The exhibition ‘A Riot Of Our Own’ looks at the Rock Against Racism (RAR) Movement of 1976-1981, through the private archive of Graphicsi -Ruth Gregory and Syd Shelton. They were RAR (London) committee members and key graphic designers of its associated material such as, the paper Temporary Hoarding, posters and stickers, badges, and illustrations. Syd photographed performers and members of the audience at RAR carnivals, gigs and demonstrations, as well as contextual social and cultural images that informed the politics of the movement, across England and Ireland. The archive is a unique repository of this pivotal period in Britain when difference was championed as empowering, anti-establishment, challenging a post-modern act, that helped to define Britain’s character.

Steven Claydon: 'I think the reason I started making these things was because of the gulf I perceive between the public or institutional modes of artistic production and the private and commercial, and also how we understand pre-avant-garde or pre-Modernist art to be , to be or any movement that supplants another with all the incumbent rewriting of history and self - aggrandisement. The fin de siècle threshold. Impressionism and Modernism, and the Doric and Ionic. So in the case of the difference between the public face of art and the private nature of it, most people's understanding of Public art is sculpture for a start, except for the odd mural. Mostly they're representations of historical figures, unless it's a Henry Moore or something like that. Invariably it's figurative and most often than not the subject is patriarchal. On top of that these works are representations of people we've mostly never heard of, and it struck me that we encounter this stuff everyday, and take it for granted...'

Open Wednesday - Sunday, 12 - 5pm

Borders, Codes and Crossings is a new body of work produced during 2007-2008.  Operating across a broad range of artistic categories and using an expansive armory of process and techniques, Nicholl's work addresses a number of engaging but complex themes.  These includ questions of aesthetic form, surface and depth, chance and order, the found and the fabricated, systems or archaeological and geographical mapping, and the relationship between work and play. 

Philippe Favier, Hervé Graumann, Kevin Francis Gray, Markus Hansen, Rosie Leventon & Kate Street

For "How to Talk to Images", Richard Wright has compiled a database of 50,000 random Internet images as the raw content for two artworks. "The Internet Speaks" and "The Mimeticon" use this database to create a world where we can “read” pictures, browse “libraries” of endless images or learn to draw with alphabets.

In celebration of six decades at the core of the
city’s cultural life, and as one of the first arts centres in the country, Plymouth Arts Centre celebrates its relationship with the city and marks its achievements. This exhibition discloses fragments of Plymouth’s past and present through archive material, film footage, radio broadcasts and stories, which focus on our 60 year history and the culture created by the city’s residents.

Root Index unearths relics from the archive and re - presents some of its remarkable history. In the production of a new commission, Reciting the City, Mike Lawson - Smith has also worked with archival material. His two - screen video installation sets the stage for a latent dialogue between Plymouth’s citizens, prompted by film footage extracted from the South West Film and Television Archive.

Open Wed-Sat 11:30-5:30pm, Thursdays in July until 8pm, Sundays and Bank Holiday 2-5:30pm 

Architecture, Art and Design since the mid 1990’s attest to a trend away from suburban sprawl back towards compact urban environments.

The Urban Tendency examines a visual culture that speaks not only of the practical realities of compact urban living, but of wanting the urban environment, even if ambivalence and critical insight provide a counterbalance to positive realizations of the contemporary city environment.

The exhibition runs from 9 July to 9 August 2008, Tuesday to Saturday, 12:00 to 18:00. Free Admission.

Over the last four years, Berlin-based artists Jay Chung (1976, Madison, USA) and Q Takeki Maeda  (1977, Nagoya, Japan) have established quite a reputation with their unpredictable and elusive collaborations: they often depart from a dubious mystification or even a veritable lie.

In so doing, Chung and Maeda have successfully established clandestine ways to take on board the aesthetic responsibility of Conceptual Art and challenge bourgeois notions of classification, private labour and style. The Cubitt exhibition Hardy Boys and Gilmore Girls aims to continue this line of thought, while directing it at the same time to a particular case.

The exhibition project of the Berlin-based artists Isabell Heimerdinger and Karina Nimmerfall topicalizes the phenomena of fictional reality, their different artistic approaches trying to describe the exchangeability of realities and their (medial) construction. In her current works, Isabell Heimerdinger foremost makes visible the border between the different forms of expression of reality, focusing here, in cooperation with actors, on “taking the place” – on interchangeable identities. Karina Nimmerfall’s walkable space installations analyze film- and television productions in view of particular usage patters of site- and space descriptions, which replace the “real” space by its medial construction.

12, 13, 19, 20, 26 & 27 July 2008

An old man confronts us with some truths about language. The strangeness of his voice merges with the buzzing and humming artefacts of an archaic recording mechanism. A young girl repeats words she is trying to memorize in what sounds like French. Several men exuberantly chant fragments of a creation myth. An elderly woman tells a story of jealousy and murder to an appreciative listener…

The Last Silent Movie opens the unvisited, silent archives of extinct and endangered languages to create a composition of voices that are not silent. They are not silent because someone is listening. The work sets free some of the ghosts and spectres haunting the unacknowledged 'unheimlich' of sound recording that allows us to hear the words and voices of people mostly now dead. In The Last Silent Movie, some voices sing, some tell stories, some recite vocabulary lists and some, directly or indirectly, accuse us – the listeners – of injustice.

Gallery 1, free entry.  Open Tuesday-Sunday 11am-6pm. 

Prophet brings together the work of three artists: Esteban Igartua, originally from Lima in Peru, now based in Bristol; Georgie Hopton based in London and upstate New York, and Cornelia Parker who lives and works in London.

Georgie Hopton’s starting point is traditional still life. In her use of painting, photography and sculpture, each medium informs the other. The sculptures are rendered out of heavy material; clay, or pulped paper, this is then tamed, shaped, and coaxed to make it form the leaves and petals. The delicacy of the flowers in both the paintings, but particularly the sculptures, is lost, but delicacy is not the point. Perched atop polished plinths the contrast of the beautiful clumsiness and the classical plinth draws us to focus on their more sober intentions.

Gallery 2 and Perimeter Space.  Open Tuesday-Sunday 11am-6pm, free entry.

A River Ain't Too Much to Love

Gallery 2

Pedro Barateiro, António Bolota, Renato Ferrão, Carla Filipe, Ana Manso, Pedro Neves Marques, Isabel Ribeiro, André Romão, Gonçalo Sena, Gustavo Sumpta

Substance

Perimeter Space

Susana Anágua, Alexandre Estrela, Margarida Garcia, Mónica Gomes, André Gonçalves, André Guedes, Pedro Henriques, Margarida Mendes, João Penalva, Pedro Diniz Reis, João Paulo Serafim, João Simões, João Tabarra, Franscico Tropa, Rui Valério

Julian Woollatt has taken his inspiration for The Historians from 20th century historical re-enactment events that take place around Britain. The project having evolved over the past four years, includes portraits, still lives and battlefield scenarios referring to the Vietnam War; the First and Second World Wars.