Grand Union is delighted to announce Simon Says/Dadda, an exhibition by Birmingham and London based artist Beverley Bennett. Comprising a newly commissioned 3-channel installation, Simon Says/Dadda is a collaborative project exploring father/daughter relationships among Black and Asian women and non-binary individuals, highlighting the deep impact that structural inequalities have within wider society.
Working in partnership with Metal, Liverpool, LUX, London and The Newbridge Project, Newcastle, Simon Says/Dadda is an ambitious large-scale film project developed through a series of gatherings across England, bringing to light stories that are currently not represented in the visual arts space.
Join us for a late opening of Albera Whittle’s We gather and dream of new congregations.
This exhibition is the culmination of 18 months of collaborative work with Alberta Whittle, Grand Union, and our Minvera Garden group for women and people of marginalised genders.
Using a combination of public sculpture, film, and workshops this exhibition will transform our gallery into a working apothecary and a space for community groups and workshops to come together.
The exhibition proposes a varity of methodologies for creating dangerously and congration as a means of remembrance and resistance. Asking questions about our commonality and the effectiveness of grassroots community building, direct community action and looking to healing gardening practices.
Join us for a late opening of Albera Whittle’s We gather and dream of new congregations.
This exhibition is the culmination of 18 months of collaborative work with Alberta Whittle, Grand Union, and our Minvera Garden group for women and people of marginalised genders.
Using a combination of public sculpture, film, and workshops this exhibition will transform our gallery into a working apothecary and a space for community groups and workshops to come together.
The exhibition proposes a varity of methodologies for creating dangerously and congration as a means of remembrance and resistance. Asking questions about our commonality and the effectiveness of grassroots community building, direct community action and looking to healing gardening practices.
Join us for a late opening of Albera Whittle’s We gather and dream of new congregations.
This exhibition is the culmination of 18 months of collaborative work with Alberta Whittle, Grand Union, and our Minvera Garden group for women and people of marginalised genders.
Using a combination of public sculpture, film, and workshops this exhibition will transform our gallery into a working apothecary and a space for community groups and workshops to come together.
The exhibition proposes a varity of methodologies for creating dangerously and congration as a means of remembrance and resistance. Asking questions about our commonality and the effectiveness of grassroots community building, direct community action and looking to healing gardening practices.
Join us for the launch of Alberta Whittle’s new exhibition We Gather and Dream of New Congregations. Using public sculpture, film, workshops, and community gardening with women’s groups, We gather and dream of new congregations seeking to address issues surrounding the use and ownership of land and to aid in the much-needed healing of our Birmingham community.
Join us at Grand Union for a screening of ‘Sweet Sugar Rage’, a film by Sistren Theatre Collective’ (1985), presented as part of Cinenova’s ‘The Work We Share’ programme.
Cinenova’s ‘The Work We Share’ is a national public programme of newly digitised films from the Cinenova collection addressing representations of gender, race, sexuality, health and community. The films are captioned by Collective Text, and supported by response commissions from contemporary artists and writers.
We will host their newly digitised film, Sweet Sugar Rage by Sistren Theatre Collective (1985, 43 minutes) alongside a new commission by artist Natasha Bonnelame inspired by the work.
Sweet Sugar Rage exposes the exploitation of women’s labour in Jamaica’s sugar cane fields and shares the themes and methods of Sistren’s workshops and theatre in the context of their wider efforts in education, employment rights and community activism.
There will be two screenings at 6-7pm and 7.30-8.30pm.
Book a seat on Eventbrite HERE
In collaboration with Grand Union, the MA Art History and Curating course at University of Birmingham presents The Age of Dreamers is Over: a group show navigating the historical scales of anthropogenic* rupture, as well as the potential for collective healing.
This immersive exhibition brings together interactive sculpture, sound, and light works from artists Louise Beer, Jack Lewdjaw, and Mina Heydari-Waite. Unified by the idea of the night and darkness as a site of creative energy and potential growth, the three artists included in this exhibition have examined forms of rupture from the climate crisis; to revolution and colonialism; to the decay of the English high street. Reflecting upon the notion of ruination and rebuilding, The Age of Dreamers is Over serves to explore the impact of human hands on one another and on the very world we live in – if we have the capacity to destroy then we can also attempt to mend and create.
*Anthropogenic: originating in human activity.
Grand Union Gallery and British-Barbadian artist Alberta Whittle are collaboratively embarking on a long-term visual art project to aid in the much-needed healing of our Birmingham community. Using public sculpture, film, workshops, and community gardening with women’s groups, we seek to address issues surrounding use and ownership of land, and use congregation to consider notions of freedom and long-term healing.
We will be launching a large outdoor sculpture – a ‘bothy’- for people to use as a place for shelter and rest in the Minerva Apothecary Garden. Working with Midlands-based women’s organisations, we have grown The Minerva Apothecary Garden adjacent to our gallery space, full of healing herbs and plants.
Join Phyllis Christopher, Grand Union and Book Works on Friday 4th March at Grand Union to mark the end of the Heads and Tails exhibition and celebrate the launch of the long-awaited Dark Room: San Francisco Sex and Protest, 1988–2003.
Phyllis Christopher’s fearless and tender photographs fuse lesbian sex and queer protest against the backdrop of a city in flux. Relocating to San Francisco from her hometown Buffalo in the late-1980s, Christopher began to collaborate with her subjects to make images in which documentary and performance converge.
Dark Room brings together fifteen years of Christopher’s work, negotiating street, club, and studio, with camera in hand, to compose a portrait of a community simultaneously defining radical articulations of queer lesbian sexuality and defending its bodily autonomy in the face of right-wing politics, the AIDS crisis and urban gentrification.
Reproducing photographs of startling intensity and sensuality alongside new writing by Susie Bright, Laura Guy, Michelle Tea and an interview with Shar Rednour, Dark Room is a heartfelt record of Christopher’s devotion to an analogue tradition, to the pleasures of photographs and the community that made them.
122 Fazeley Street, B5 5RT, Grand Union Canal (adjacent to Junction Works)
Please note: event outdoors, booking not essential.
Join us on Digbeth First Friday, 5 – 6pm for an introduction to the first Field Commission with artist Asad Raza.
Since 2019 Grand Union has been working on the refurbishment of Junction Works, the former Canal Offices in Digbeth. Artist duo Cooking Sections have been guiding this process through their interventions on the site in their Empire Remains Shop programme. The next phase of this project is The Field Commission: the adoption of a canalside field site for twelve-month artistic commissions in collaboration with Canal and River Trust.
In this informal talk, Asad will introduce Reabsorption, a new work focussing on a unique form of soil remediation. Working with soil scientists, architects, and community members, Asad is continuing to study the existing soil to determine its toxicity and created a recipe for a ‘neosoil’ specifically designed to dilute this toxicity.