Art Sheffield 2010 - Life: A User's Manual

About

Yorkshire Artspace: Persistence Works hosts Art Sheffield 2010, the city-wide contemporary art event organised by Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum (SCAF). Art Sheffield 2010 will take place across the city with other spaces including Site Gallery, Millennium Gallery, S1 Artspace, Bloc, Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery, other venues and the public realm. For Art Sheffield 2010, SCAF have worked with Netherlands-based curators Frederique Bergholtz and Annie Fletcher, who have collaborated with curators and artists in the city to select a dynamic and varied programme, featuring artwork that reflects the curatorial framework chosen for the event this year. The title of Art Sheffield 2010 — Life: A User's Manual — refers to Georges Perec's 1978 novel in which he builds up a detailed picture of the inhabitants of a single apartment block by describing the spaces in which they live, the objects in their rooms, the photos and paintings on the walls. There is something to this concentration on detail and the relationship between the individual and the collective that seems timely to explore when we feel as never before — especially with the current crisis — the effects of economic and social pressures on our everyday actions. Attempting to grapple with such global changes and not be overwhelmed by them — venturing to ask ‘where am I in this?' — is where art and the encounters it creates can be most powerful. A key concern overall is to explore the notion of ‘affect'. Often used interchangeably with the experience of feeling or emotion, it is essentially an ability to affect others and in turn to be affected by them. Art Sheffield 2010 — Life: A User's Manual proposes that unspectacular acts of everyday ‘affect' might be a way to chart a path through current circumstances. Affect, not understood in the romantic sense as catharsis, often promised by art, but as the potential for embodied interpersonal experience which may suggest the next possible step within the bigger picture. For Art Sheffield 2010, Yorkshire Artspace will be housing an installation by Rachel Koolen, and postcards by Ruth Ewan (collectable at all Art Sheffield 2010 venues).