Art Sheffield 2013

Bloc Projects invites you to Art Sheffield 2013, which brings together new commissions, exhibitions and performances by international, UK and Sheffield-based artists at locations across the city. This year’s festival exhibition Zero Hours is combined with, for the first time, a parallel programme of independent exhibitions and events.

Zero Hours starts with a single work, Joseph Beuys’ Wirtschafteswerte (Economic Values), 1980. As Beuys’ work crosses the Berlin wall to look back at the West, the exhibition takes the premise that sometimes, to see your own situation clearly you have to go elsewhere. The exhibition and associated events draw together a debate about time, work and labour.

The exhibition includes work by Edgar Arceneaux, Elena Bajo, Zoe Beloff, Joseph Beuys, Ben Cain, Garth Evans, Forced Entertainment, The Grantchester Pottery, Urs Fischer, Mikhail Karikis, Ryan Mosley, David Riff and Dmitry Gutov, Oliver Ressler and Katja Strunz at locations across the city.

As part of Zero Hours, Bloc Projects are pleased to present a new film commission by Vienna based artist Oliver Ressler, and two new commissions by The Grantchester Pottery on the Bloc Billboards .

Documenting the privatisation of both a municipal water system and a popular market in the city of Tblisis, Ressler’s The Plundering tells the story of disillusion in post-soviet Georgia following the 2003 Rose Revolution and the subsequent implementation of neoliberal policies across the country. The country is now ranked by the World Bank as 9th of 185 economies for ‘ease of doing business’ and has increasing levels of poverty.

In compositions designed specifically for the billboards, decorative arts company The Grantchester Pottery incorporate found images and ephemera into digitally re-produced hand painted collages. Set up by artists Phil Root and Giles Round, The Grantchester Pottery draws historical precedent from Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, which aimed to unite the decorative and fine arts and create a new way for artists to work together, employing a collective output rather than individual efforts.