Something for the weekend? The Manchester Weekender, 1-3 October.

The Manchester Weekender, a new autumn event that wraps up the best of the city’s art, culture and festivals, sets its stall out

An autumn visit to Manchester is always a safe bet: decent weather, nightlife in full swing, galleries opening new blockbusters and more festivals than you can shake a VIP pass at (science, food and drink, literature, music, comedy) – it all adds up to a good time. But this autumn, things may well be a little bit different.

Call us ambitious, but we decided to ask the eight museums and galleries behind this blog to get together with some of the city’s other cultural events – music shindigs such as Un-convention, say, or the rapidly growing Manchester Literature Festival. Wouldn’t it be great, we thought, if we could get everyone to work together for just one weekend?

Thus The Manchester Weekender was born, a Friday, Saturday and Sunday in October (1-3) that attempts to wrap up the best of the city’s culture into one unforgettable weekend, via 30 organisations, 8 international festivals and hundreds of artists.

So, what’s in the Weekender? The full programme is under wraps until 6 September (when we launch it as a city guide on this site), but we can reveal that it will include interactive art, bicycle tours, boat parties, street dance, the future of urban music, digital-classical musical fusions, performance art, midnight film screenings, three-course meals, the world’s best known visual artists, festival launches and much more. You can expect artists such as Jarvis Cocker, Jah Wobble, Olafur Eliasson, Black Audio Film Collective, Rachel Whiteread, JMW Turner (but before you ask, no, we’re not bringing him back from the grave), Jonathan Franzen, Matthew Krysko, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Bill Drummond, Broke N £nglish, Peaches Christ, Lynn Barber, Gillian Wearing and many others.

Highlights include:

1. The Land Between Us at The Whitworth, a blockbuster exhibition that opens with a real forest created by Olafur Eliasson (best known for his enormous sun-like installation at Tate Modern). Elsewhere, walk a narrow path stacked with 50 watercolours by J.M.W. Turner, or see Black Audio Film Collective, William Holman Hunt and Rachel Whiteread.

2. The opening of Abandon Normal Devices. Choose from late night openings at galleries across Manchester or Lawrence Malstaf’s Shrink, where, inside the Freemason’s Hall, the artist is claustrophobically vacuum-packed and suspended in mid-air.

3. Jonathan Franzen at The Whitworth Art Gallery. Jonathan Franzen reads from his latest novel in an evening that’s part of Dave Haslam’s ‘in conversation’ series – an exceptional opportunity to get up close to one of America’s best-known authors.

4. Manchester by Boat. The Mark Addy’s Robert Owen Brown (whose traditional British dishes Observer critic Jay Rayner once described as ‘an old-fashioned treat’) serves up three courses. On a boat – down the Irwell to the Ship Canal.

5. Krysko & Kashiwagi. Part performance art and part club night, DJ Matthew Krysko (The Warehouse Project) and artist Naomi Kashiwagi use the Whitworth as the backdrop for a work that combines electronic music, wind-up gramophones, shellac records and the latest in digital DJ technology.

Want to find out more? Join our mailing list (top right of the page) or hop over to the Weekender page and fill in your details. And then wait until 6 September when the full programme will be revealed.

Image: Lawrence Malstaff, Shrink, courtesy the artist. Part of Abandon Normal Devices.

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