KUNG HEI FAT CHOI! (HAPPY CHINESE NEW YEAR!)
Feb 14, 2010 11:00am talk/event
Join us for performances, music and creative workshops for all the family.
FREE. Drop in, no need to book.

GRAYSON PERRY : VISUAL DIALOGUES
Feb 1, 2011 - Feb 12, 2012
This display features the gallery's two recently purchased artworks by Grayson Perry: a large ceramic vase Jane Austen in E17 and one of his first major etchings, Print for a Politician.
Co-curated by The Creative Consultants, a group of young people aged 15-18, and artist Jim Medway, the display uses film, text and unusual objects to make links between these exciting contemporary artworks and rarely seen examples of historic costume, prints and ceramics from our collections.

UNDER THAT CLOUD
Nov 19, 2011 - Apr 15, 2012
An exhibition of jewellery by 18 international artists produced in response to their experience of being stranded together in Mexico City in April 2010 under the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud.
Their enforced stay became an exciting opportunity to make new work inspired by their impressions of Mexico – the vibrant colours, the traffic chaos, the architecture, the ancient heritage, the music and the people.
The featured artists are: Caroline Broadhead (UK), Ramon Puig Cuyàs (Spain), Gemma Draper (Spain), Jürgen Eickhoff (Germany), Nedda El-Asmar (Belgium), Cristina Filipe (Portugal), Agnieszka Knap (Sweden), Benjamin Lignel (France), Jorge Manilla (Belgium/Mexico), Nanna Melland (Norway), Sarah O’Hana (UK), Jiro Kamata (Japan/Germany), Manon van Kouswijk (Netherlands/Australia), Lucy Sarneel (Netherlands), Karin Seufert (Germany), Janina Stübler (Germany), Tore Svensson(Sweden), and Andrea Wagner (Netherlands). Curated by Jo Bloxham.

MARK LECKEY
Feb 17 - Mar 18, 2012
The work of Mark Leckey will be the first exhibition as part of Manchester Art Gallery’s new collaborative programming relationship with the Serpentine Gallery.
Leckey won the Turner Prize in 2008 and his work encompasses sculpture, sound, film & performance. It also draws on his personal experiences, particularly his fascination with the Manchester dance music scene from his formative years spent in the North of England. The exhibition will include a series of live performances by Leckey and a new work created especially for Manchester.

IN TRANSLATION : WOMEN, MIGRATION AND BRITISHNESS
Feb 25, 2012 - Feb 1, 2013
The Empire Marketing Board poster collection represents one of the more challenging and fascinating areas of the gallery's collections.
Created during the 1920s and '30s to promote trade and understanding between Empire countries, the posters present an official view of the British Empire that, from today's perspective, is often uncomfortable. Around 200 of these posters were given to the gallery in 1932 as illustrations of the artists’ role in inter-war design. Yet despite the uniqueness of this collection, they have remained virtually unknown and unused until now.

ROGER BALLEN : PHOTOGRAPHY 1982-2011
Mar 30 - May 13, 2012
Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950 but for over 30 years he has lived and worked in South Africa coming to photography after a career as a geologist and mining consultant. He is now recognised as one of the foremost South African photographers along with David Golblatt. He began his photography by recording the poor and dispossessed white population of South Africa in the area of the Platteland.
His subjects are day labourers, scrapyard workers and security guards. More recently in his suite of works entitled Boarding House he has combined his subjects with contrived still-life compositions to create strange dreamlike psychological dramas within the confines of a boarding house near Johannesburg. Here poor transient workers, criminals on the run, witchdoctors and abandoned children are invited to take part in dramas that are like film sets replete with primitive drawings, sculptural elements, found objects and the pet dogs cats and birds that inhabit the boarding house together with the snakes, rats and insects which roam freely through it.

WE FACE FORWARD : ART FROM WEST AFRICA TODAY
Jun 1 - Sep 16, 2012
To celebrate the 2012 Olympics, Manchester’s two main galleries will collaborate for the first time on a major exhibition of contemporary art drawn from West Africa. Taking place in three locations across the city, the Whitworth Art Gallery and Park, the Manchester Art Gallery and Platt Hall (Gallery of Costume) the exhibition will feature painting, drawing, photography, textiles, sculpture, installation, video and sound work – from a wide range of practitioners whose work is internationally acclaimed, but relatively little seen in the UK.
Manchester has strong historic links with West Africa that go back to the barbarity of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the industrial revolution. The city’s galleries reflect these links in their collections, which include the remarkable indigo-dyed Malian boubou robe and the ‘Manchester-made’ African textiles at the Whitworth and the Nigerian and Ghanian textiles at the Gallery of Costume.
While acknowledging the past, this wide-ranging exhibition will focus on contemporary connections and ideas circulating today.

THE FIRST CUT
Oct 5, 2012 - Jan 1, 2013
This ambitious contemporary art exhibition will bring together international artists who work with paper in a revolutionary way. Bringing together established and emerging artists from Japan, China, Australia, America, Germany, France and the UK, they will transform the galleries with works ranging from large-scale installations, which literally explode from and spill out of the gallery walls, through to small-scale intricate sculptures. The artists in this show all draw on a diverse range of influences from globalisation, environmentalism, sexuality and slavery to fashion, architecture, fairytales and death metal. Artists include Rob Ryan, James Aldridge, Su Blackwell, Nicola Dale, Andreas Kocks, Elisabeth Lecourt, Andrea Mastrovito, Mia Pearlman, Georgia Russell, Justine Smith and Kara Walker.