‘Autonomy’ – Fine Art’s Rose Butler and Michelle Atherton featured at the Middlesbrough Art Weekender 2019 exhibition next week
The Middlesbrough Art Weekender 2019
The Middlesbrough Art Weekender (MAW) is an annual contemporary arts festival held in Middlesbrough. From 26 to 29 September 2019, MAW brings a full programme of events, exhibitions, performances and screenings to venues across the town centre. The focus of MAW2019 is autonomy and local, regional and international artists are invited to present work tackling and responding to this.
Across the four-day run of the festival, there will be an interactive installations at the Middlesbrough Town Hall, screenings of local film The Creek at MIMA, dye-making workshops and much more including public artworks, kinetic sculpture, six exhibitions and live music. The festival opens on Thursday 26 September at 5.30PM with an art trail across Middlesbrough.
The exhibition Autonomy will be hosted at the Auxiliary Project Space and presents the engagements of artists with their negotiations with history, landscape, memory, icon, the state, technology or each other, responding to the question: What does it mean to speak of autonomy – artistic, political, cultural, financial – at a time when reality has been turned on its head?
Sheffield Hallam University’s Rose Butler and Michelle Atherton will both feature in the exhibition. See the full festival programme here and details about the artists taking part here.
Autonomy at the Middlesbrough Art Weekender 2019
The Auxiliary Project Space, Middlesbrough TS1 1SR (and others)
Thursday 26 September – Sunday 29 September 2019, 12PM – 4PM.
With official opening on Thursday 26 September 5.30PM – 9PM.
Follow the Weekender @MAW_weekender #MAW.
Banner images:
Still from archival training material at the Stasi Records Agency; Berlin. Courtesy of Rose Butler & Absorbing Red Photons, Michelle Atherton.
Rose Butler is an artist, researcher and senior lecturer of Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University, she works with video, photography, sound, animation and installation. She is a Doctoral Researcher registered in C3RI and sponsored by the SHU Vice Chancellor’s Scholarship Scheme. She is also a board member of Bloc Projects and a freelance artist mentor. Find out more about Rose’s work here.
Michelle Atherton is an artist working with images and temporal states, that is researching particular moments or sets of conditions in our collective histories. The aim of the work is to probe these entanglements and the complexities that surround us. All her work is image-based, holding a long-standing fascination with the fact that images appear to be all front. Part of the research investigates the potency of the image in its rhetorical and ambiguous forms; and our encounters with it. The work often incorporates video, photography, sound, collage and writing. The work cultivates a type of image-dissonance, through a series of after or pre-images. Her artwork and research has been supported by the Arts Council UK and the Arts and Humanities Research Council and shown throughout Europe in variety of contexts including galleries and museums, festivals, and conferences, and via publication.