Image: Jason Rhoades, Tate Touche from My Madinah: in pursuit of my ermitage, courtesy Tate Liverpool

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Listen here: Anish Kapoor for Creative Tourist

Image: Negative Box Shadow, Anish Kapoor, courtesy Manchester Art Gallery

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Rafael Lozano-Hemmer – Recorders at Manchester Art Gallery from creativetourist.com on Vimeo.

Listen to an Audioboo with Rafael and Jonathan Schofield, or read Jessica Lack’s interview with the artist. Recorders is part of The Manchester Weekender, with a special late night opening at Manchester Art Gallery (featuring interactive art and electronic music) taking place on Friday 1 October. Free entry.

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Curator Mike Chavez-Dawson, plus artists Len Horsey, Brian Reed, RELAX and Lynn Harris, speak about Unrealised Potential, a collaborative group exhibition ‘that reveals the mechanics of curating’.

Unrealised Potential runs at Cornerhouse until 12 September. Free entry.

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Manchester Art Gallery’s current major exhibition, A World Observed, traces the career of one of the doyennes of British photography, Dorothy Bohm, and plunders this octogenarian’s archives to put together the first real retrospective exhibition of her work ever to be staged – featuring 250 works that trace a career spanning six decades and several continents.

Prussian-born Bohm, who fled to England at the outbreak of WW2, is one of the founding directors of The Photographers’ Gallery in London. This exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery walks us through her career, from early black and white portraits (many from Manchester, incidentally, where she first trained and worked as a commercial photographer), through experiments with Polaroids in the 1980s, to her more recent abstract work.

While Bohm isn’t a household name, she has had a huge influence on British photography, working through the Photographers’ Gallery to establish the discipline as a serious art form and giving emerging artists their big breaks. ‘She gave people like Martin Parr their first shows,’ says her daughter (and co-curator of the exhibition), Monica Bohm. ‘So she is incredibly well respected in the industry – she’s the elder stateswoman of British photography, if you like, and is an honorary fellow of The Royal Photographic Society.’

The exhibition in Manchester is likely to interest both photo aficionados and those interested in social history – Monica Bohm describes her mother’s early work as ‘humanist street photography, capturing the moment in the manner of Cartier Bresson’. Bohm, meanwhile, continues to take pictures that belie her advancing years. ‘People are often surprised by the youth and vibrancy of her colour work,’ says Monica Bohm. ‘She focuses on fragments of the urban landscape – mannequins, advertising hoardings – that are otherwise overlooked. These photographs have an abstract quality; there’s a deliberate spatial ambiguity and you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at. But nothing is manipulated – she will still only work with film.’

In this exclusive vodcast, Dorothy talks candidly about her career to her daughter (and co-curator of the exhibition), Monica.

A World Observed 1940-2010: Photographs by Dorothy Bohm, Manchester Art Gallery, Mosley Street M2 3JL (0161 235 8888). Until 30 August. Free entry.

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Read a transcript of our conversation with Leo Fitzmaurice.

Find out more about the advertising-drenched world of Leo Fitzmaurice. Here, the artist talks in detail about his latest site-specific, Pop art-bright artwork, Panoramia, now on show at The Lowry.  In this video, Fitzmaurice talks to Elisa Oliver, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Leeds University, about the link between his previous work, and his interest in everyday advertising, brochures and branded goods, and the new installation at The Lowry. For a different look at the artist’s work, go behind the scenes at The Lowry with our installation photographs and interview with the artist here.

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Read a transcript of our conversation with Richard Wilson.

The Turner Prize nominated sculptor Richard Wilson talks exclusively to the co-curators of Cornerhouse’s latest art exhibition, Contemporary Art Iraq: Adalet Germiany and Sarah Perks. This, the first Iraqi exhibition of its kind since the first Gulf War, provides ‘a platform for a new generation of artists who acknowledge the aesthetics of conflict, but are not bound by them’, according to Germiany in a feature elsewhere on this site. Germiany heads up ArtRole, a UK-based arts organisation that works to develop and promote cultural exchanges between the UK and the Middle East (most notably, perhaps, staged a three-day arts festival in the former Red Jail in Sulaymaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan, that featured Richard Wilson’s oil installation, 20:50). 

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Art collector-turned-philanthropist, Anthony D’Offay talks to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s Keith Hartley about ARTIST ROOMS, the series of touring exhibitions that take some of the most important artists of recent years to galleries across the UK. With over 700 artworks and some 50 ‘rooms’ (complete series of works by individual artists), D’Offay hopes to show a ‘concentration of important works by contemporary artists’ in galleries from Aberdeen to St. Ives. Recalling the museums and galleries in the cities where he grew up, D’Offay describes his passion for taking art to the nation and cites the experience of seeing first-hand artwork by international artists as ‘the only reason that I am here this evening’.

Read a transcript of Anthony d’Offay in conversation.

The conversation between D’Offay and Hartley was filmed at Manchester Art Gallery and was part of its series of talks and debates staged for Friends of the Gallery.

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Stuart Maconie, the broadcaster and travel writer once described by The Times as a ‘national treasure’, talks Andy Pearce at the People’s History Museum about democracy, protest and how a Northern town turned local politics into a global issue.

Watch Ideas Worth Fighting For from creativetourist.com on Vimeo.

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Read a transcript of this interview with Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan.

Cairo: The Breaking Up of the Ice is a new collaborative exhibition at Cornerhouse by Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan. The show hinges on a film installation inspired by the writings of the 19th century artist, ornithologist and frontiersman John James Audubon, a man renowned for his epic publication The Birds of America.

Cairo (2009) is part of a film trilogy made during two expeditions to the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, a trilogy that contrasts Audubon’s tales of frontier America with its present-day counterpart. Audubon spent six weeks trapped by ice at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in a place now known as Cairo. Once wealthy, this southern Illinois town is now largely abandoned, devastated over time by floods, racial segregation, social unrest and economic decline. In their film, Cartwright and Jordan set Audubon’s narrative against desolate images of contemporary Cairo.

In this exclusive vodcast, artist and independent curator Dave Griffiths talks to Cartwright and Jordan about both the film and the supporting work that makes up their new show at Manchester’s Cornerhouse.

Cairo: The Breaking Up of the Ice runs at Cornerhouse from 23 January -28 February 2010. Free entry. The Audubon Trilogy: Delineations of American Scenery & Manners, the book that accompanies the show and includes all three films from the trilogy, as well as commissioned essays, photographs and transcripts from Audubon’s journals, will be on sale at Cornerhouse.

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