A strand of the festival has been curated by Amy Carter Gordon, Innovation Manager at Hallam’s Culture and Creativity Research Institute, and has been designed to engage participants in a series of free public installations and encounters from sites of international cultural significance through to community-led spaces.
The curation will feature work from Hallam artist-researchers; Helen Blejerman, Christopher Hall, Dr Austin Houldsworth, Dr Kaisu Koski, Tim Machin, Penny McCarthy, TC McCormack, Dr Tom Payne, and Aron Spall.
Amy Carter Gordon said: “It is a pleasure to introduce my programme ‘Entanglement, commons and cultural mycelium’ and once more collaborate with No Bounds, building on the critical success of our 2022 festival. This year, I have focused on deepening a collective curiosity of the city and curated Sheffield Hallam practice-based artist-researchers and their collaborators to test new ideas for public audiences through film, installations and performances.
“Responding to local and global challenges, the exhibits create a locus for dialogue, space for reflection and a call to action. Community commons and collective endeavour shape the programme; a meandering trail, much of which could be walked, from our distinctive neighbourhoods to the cultural centre of the city. It seeks to level our communal experience of art; encouraging attendees to encounter culture in unexpected spaces and placing them at the heart of active research."
Sheffield’s international contemporary art space, Site Gallery, will host Base Notes and Place Holders by TC McCormack and Tommy Støckel (Copenhagen/Berlin) a curation of international artists from across Europe and a long-term curatorial research project which asks audiences to consider a form of entanglement between sculpture, structure and sound. The interactive programme including sound and debate, seeks to question the hierarchies of forms and reimagine the traditional distinctions between subject and object, spectator and participant.
No Bounds will return to Sheffield and District African Caribbean Community Association (SADACCA), a cultural icon of the city, which will host a premiere of Storm-Cloud: Thrown into Form by Dr Tom Payne.
Storm-Cloud is an immersive reimagining of John Ruskin’s prophetic public lecture Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. The experience will combine live performance, spoken text, digital projection and a unique weather soundscape to conjure a striking atmosphere of environmental dis-ease that evokes the climate crisis.
Green Estate on the Manor will premiere two exhibits during the festival. Green Estate is one of the largest social enterprises in South Yorkshire in a unique rural-within-urban location and is a beacon for sustainable living.
Green Estate will host Tim Machin’s The Park and the Castle, a voiced artwork about imagining-into-being modern Sheffield. Somewhere between a performance and an exhibition, it will feature archival fragments from the people involved and impacted by changes in Sheffield from the 1950s to the present day and ask audiences to reimagine modern Sheffield.
School of the Eclipse by Dr Kaisu Koski and Penny McCarthy will also premiere at Green Estate, exploring the relationship between humans and bears through real and imagined bears, including Bruin, the historic bear of Sheffield’s Botanical Gardens. The audience will encounter multiple conceptualisations of the bear using forms of physical presence, images, and storytelling.
Exchange Place Studios, in the rapidly transforming area of Castlegate in Sheffield, will feature Flow State by Aron Spall and Daniel Bacchus in the basement space.
Flow State is an audiovisual installation which merges experiences and data, and images and objects from the River Don, its tributaries and archives. The exhibition reflects the underground location of the basement, right at the confluence of the Rivers Don and Sheaf and highlights the partnership between Sheffield Hallam and the River Don Project.
Sheffield Cathedral will host the premiere of Mexican artist Helen Blejerman’s film Areas of Search. The film investigates the religious aspect of families in Mexico who have lost a daughter or sister to femicide and the areas where people search for the victims’ bodies.
Community art studio The Art House will exhibit Countering Rhetoric, two new projects by Dr Austin Houldsworth.
Countering Rhetoric investigates the political rhetoric of ‘Trickle-down economics’ and ‘Levelling up’ through the proposition of two interactive alternative wealth redistribution devices that turn rhetoric into reality.
