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Grand Union is delighted to present a solo exhibition of new work by Laura Oldfield Ford, Chthonic Reverb.

Ford spent six weeks in residence in 2015 investigating Digbeth, the area where the Grand Union gallery space is situated. Having lived in Birmingham in early 1990s, she is reconnecting with the city through a series of 'dérives'. These extensive walks and conversations unlock memories and narratives embedded in the architecture.

For her show at Grand Union, Ford will transform the gallery space by creating billboards constructed from plywood and sitex (perforated steel), the types of materials used to board up abandoned buildings and disused factories. The process of building installations allows Ford to scrutinise the psychic affects of space and architecture. These materials represent the precarious and provisional architecture of the liminal. Her own experience of living in squatted housing and the narratives surrounding precarity are distilled in these materials.

These pieces also create a surface upon which she will paste A0 photocopies of drawings from her walks in Birmingham. She uses cut up as a method, a way of simultaneously inhabiting different temporal zones; the jarring, uncanny nature of these collages is an attempt to articulate moments of historical rupture and conflate this with an intimate, very personal relationship with the city.

The space will be permeated by a series of sound pieces, field recordings and conversations, a new way of working for Ford. She records, writes and draws as a way of mapping the psychic contours of the city. Her work spans moments of historical intensity, for example a recurring point in the show is the 1972 Battle of Saltley Gate. She drifts among the area's liminal, transient and spectral populations- the Italian community on Fazeley Street, residents of Birmingham's Rowton House, Irish pubs round the coach station, post-punk, traveller and rave scenes- as a way of gauging the mood of the contemporary city, of a particular moment within a conflation of temporalities.

She is returning to the towpaths and backstreets of Digbeth, the industrial estates and regenerated vistas of Eastside and examining them through the prism of the 'Big City Plan' and impending arrival of HS2. She is interrogating the impact of urban regeneration in Birmingham and looking at the role of artists and the 'creative industries' in this process.

Grand Union and The Showroom are working in partnership on the commissioning of Laura Oldfield Ford's work in 2016-2017. This project will be developed later in the year at Edgware Road, where The Showroom is situated, and will culminate in a solo exhibition in 2017.

Biography
Laura Oldfield Ford b.1973 ( Halifax, West Yorkshire) is an artist working and living in London. She completed a BA at the Slade in 2001, an MA in Painting at the RCA in 2007, and is curently a researcher in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art . Recent exhibitions include Itinerant Code, Tensta Konsthall, 2015; Ruin Lust, Tate Britain 2014; Recording Britain, V&A 2012; Anarchy Unmasked, British Library 2014; Soft Estate, Bluecoat Liverpool 2013 and Spacex 2013; Desire Lines, Caja Madrid, Barcelona 2012; There is a Place New Art gallery Walsall 2012; Orbitecture Focal Point Gallery, Southend 2011 and Poster Sites Arnolfini, Bristol 2010.

In 2013 she was awarded a Stanley Picker Fellowship at Kingston University where she undertook new research on the phenomenon of suburbanisation. This culminated in a show-Seroxat, Smirnoff, THC- in 2014.

She lectures and teaches across the UK and internationally on issues surrounding urbanism, architecture, protest and memory. This has included institutions such as Royal College of Art, Chelsea, Central St Martins and Goldsmiths. She regularly give talks and lectures on similar themes; recent examples are Tate Britain, Goethe Institute Amsterdam, British Library, LSE, Tensta Konsthall.

Writing is an integral part of her practice, and in 2011 Verso published a collection of her zine Savage Messiah. She is a contributing writer/artist to Art Review, Guardian, Granta Magazine, Building Design, Mute magazine and Verso Blog.

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Grand Union is delighted to present a solo exhibition of new work by Laura Oldfield Ford, Chthonic Reverb. Ford spent six weeks in residence in 2015 investigating Digbeth, the area where the Grand Union gallery space is situated. Having lived in Birmingham in early 1990s, she is reconnecting with the city through a series of [...]

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Ikon shows the first UK exhibition by renowned Chinese artist Kan Xuan (born 1972, Anhui province), presenting a wide selection of single screen video pieces made since the late 1990s. Refreshingly unpretentious and economical in style, with familiar subject matter, they are profoundly philosophical about the nature of human life.

Kan Xuan's work is often based on personal experience, and she herself sometimes features, as in the early video Kanxuan! Ai! (1999) in which she is seen dashing through subway tunnels shouting her own name, as if searching for herself, and answering in the affirmative, "Ai!". She is moving against a tide of heaving humanity, at once anxious, funny, romantic, whilst making a clear political statement, representing the plight of an individual in the face of a totalitarian mass.

Other early works convey the personal as physical. Looking, looking, looking for ... (2002) traces the movement of a spider across two naked bodies, young, lithe, one male, one female. Viewers are pushed and pulled between feelings that arise from such sensuality and arachnophobic tendencies while identifying with the oblivious creature, simply seeking a place to hide. In the same year Kan Xuan made A persimmon, in which she passes a ripe piece of fruit between her hands, reducing it to a juicy pulp in the process and so combining lusciousness and cruelty.

In contrast, A happy girl (2002) is wonderfully straightforward. Made soon after the artist arrived in Amsterdam from Beijing, it shows an empty sculpture pedestal in a leafy garden, suddenly occupied by the artist, naked and dancing. The playful freedom of her movement suggests sheer joy, found in herself and in her circumstances.

Kan Xuan made other works during her time in Europe that similarly convey feelings of liberation and an exciting voyage of discovery. She also became increasingly preoccupied by the e ects of globalisation and its economic impact, both in China and the West, especially for those who do not enjoy political power. She saw the widening gap between rich and poor as symptomatic of notions of true value becoming lost - reflected in works such as Garbage (1999) and Island (2006-2009).

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, including text by Shanghai based writer Lu Leiping. Visit Ikon's online shop for the full range of Ikon's catalogues and limited editions.

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Ikon shows the first UK exhibition by renowned Chinese artist Kan Xuan (born 1972, Anhui province), presenting a wide selection of single screen video pieces made since the late 1990s. Refreshingly unpretentious and economical in style, with familiar subject matter, they are profoundly philosophical about the nature of human life.

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Björk has shared her simple and beautiful method for clearing her head and establishing some sense of meaning, which sees her shunning attending church for simply going for a walk in an Icelandic tundra.

Perhaps the island's most famous native, the singer talked to The Guardian about her formative years in a new interview.

"I was brought up in the suburbs of Reykjavík," she said. "I lived next to the last block of flats, and then it was moss and tundra. I used to walk a lot on my own and sing at the top of my lungs. I think a lot of Icelandic people do this.

"You don't go to church or a psychotherapist - you go for a walk and feel better."

5 hot lagoons in Iceland: From the Blue Lagoon spa to the geothermal

Iceland is full of vast, barren spaces where few humans dwell, and Björk would draw peace and inspiration from this.

"When I was a teenager I used to hitchhike," she recalled, "and camp, and spend a few days on my own each year. The first money I got, when I was 13, I used to buy a tent.

"It was my ideal freedom. And I don't think I'm alone in that ideal. There's a sacredness that comes with this landscape."

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Björk: 'In Iceland we don't go to church, we go for a walk'

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Björk has shared her simple and beautiful method for clearing her head and establishing some sense of meaning, which sees her shunning attending church for simply going for a walk in an Icelandic tundra. Perhaps the island's most famous native, the singer talked to The Guardian about her formative years in a new interview.

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Kamil Tatara at Centrala

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Hi Birmingham hi hi hi!

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* DARLING I C U

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a little soul-cleansing life drawing [NOT PICTURED]

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My art admin GIF is the best thing about art admin days.

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The political stakes in the UK and the US are high, yet both countries have of late embraced impractical candidates with far-left ideologies. In the UK, those who voted for socialist Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, when he had little experience, may be ruing their decision after his failure to to put forward a strong case for the UK remaining in the EU. Meanwhile, in the US, Bernie Sanders supporters clung to their candidate even when his remaining in the race diverted Hillary Clinton from focusing on Donald Trump.

Finding a candidate who embraces your values is understandable, crucial even. But fervent idealism, which places support for a certain candidate above all practical consequences of that support, is foolhardy. According to ethicists, it's also immoral.

"The purpose of voting is not to express your fidelity to a worldview. It's not to wave a flag or paint your face in team colors; it's to produce outcomes," says Jason Brennan, a philosopher at Georgetown University and author of The Ethics of Voting. "If they're smart, they'll vote for the candidate likely to best produce the outcome they want. That might very well be compromising, but if voting for a far-left or far-right candidate means that you're just going to lose the election, then you've brought the world further away from justice rather than closer to it."

Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, says it's important for voters to balance their principles with the consequences of their actions. He suggests creating an equation to multiply how much one favors a candidate by that candidate's chances of having a positive impact.

In general, two broad schools of ethics have bearing on how votes are cast, according to Michael LaBossiere, a philosophy professor at Florida A&M University. Utilitarianism suggests that the best action is whichever creates the maximum happiness for the greatest number of people-i.e. it's best to vote with an eye to the political consequences. On the flip side, a deontological approach argues that the action itself, rather than the consequences, has moral worth, and so it would be acceptable to, say, champion Sanders regardless of how this might affect long-term US politics.

"As a citizen, I have a duty to others because it's not just me and my principles, but everybody," says LaBossiere, who favors the utilitarian approach. "I have to consider how what I do will impact other people. For example, if I was a die-hard Bernie supporter, I might say my principles tell me to vote for Bernie. But I'm not going to let my principles condemn other people to suffering."

What can get lost in strategic voting, however, is nuance-opting for the more practical candidate usually means opting for something closer to the status quo. That leaves limited opportunities for perspectives that fall outside party lines.

"You enter a polling booth, there's a complicated decision floating aroundin your head, and the best you can say is, 'I vote for Hillary Clinton,' or 'I vote for Donald Trump,'" says Eric Pacuit, a philosophy professor at the University of Maryland. "It's very limited."

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Ethicists say voting with your heart, without a care about the consequences, is actually immoral

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The political stakes in the UK and the US are high, yet both countries have of late embraced impractical candidates with far-left ideologies. In the UK, those who voted for socialist Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, when he had little experience, may be ruing their decision after his failure to to put forward a strong case for the UK remaining in...

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Magna Carta (An Embroidery) is a 2015 work by English installation artist Cornelia Parker. The artwork is an embroidered representation of the complete text and images of an online encyclopedia article for Magna Carta, as it appeared in English Wikipedia on 15 June 2014, the 799th anniversary of the document.

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Having trouble this week balancing the necessity of research with protecting myself from political burnout. It is unpleasant.

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Read 1,278 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. With Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to a...

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Last week, in the wake of Brexit, a guy waylaid me near my apartment building. Was I voting in New York's congressional primaries, he wanted to know, flourishing flyers. "I can't," I explained, "I'm English." There was a pause. "Oh," he said, "I'm sorry. My condolences."

Brexit has broken Brand Britain. It's not just the pound that has plummeted since 24 June; there has also been a rapid devaluation of our international image. Once upon a time - like, three weeks ago - a "British" accent was an asset in the US. It connoted class, culture and cosmopolitanism. Now it conveys parochialism, priggishness and poor political decisions.

For someone who is an expat in America, Brexit has felt like having a very public, but sort of embarrassing, death in the extended family. Everyone I come across seems to feel a need to acknowledge what happened without really knowing what to say. (With the exception of one stranger in a lift who heard me discussing Brexit with another Brit and promptly started Amerisplaining. It's not about racism, she informed us between floors; it's about pride and sovereignty. 'Kay. Thanks. Bye.) Mostly, though, Americans clock my accent and simply say "Brexit" pityingly. It has basically become shorthand for: "Hi, how are you? Sorry your country failed."

Then there's American media smuggery. Despite needing some frenzied post-referendum Googling to realise Brexit wasn't a breakfast cereal and Brussels wasn't (just) a sprout, some US commentators seem to have become overnight EU aficionados. Others have relished the chance to give Britain a serving of the scorn we have heaped on it over Donald Trump. Brexit voters missed the lesson of 1776, trumpeted the Washington Post. Great Britain or "Little England"?, asked the New York Times. British Lose Right to Claim That Americans are Dumber, announced the New Yorker. It's hard to escape a sense of stateside schadenfreude, compounded by the referendum results being announced shortly before 4 July, the 240th anniversary of the US's own, rather more triumphant, Amerexit.

British politics rarely cause so much interest in the US. Last year's general election, for example, passed most Americans by. Brexit is different for a number of reasons. For one thing, it's more exciting to watch the world burn rather than to see the democratic process slowly chugging along. "British politics turns into a fast-paced TV drama," enthused CNN. Then there are the populist parallels with Trump's ascendancy and worries that the June result foreshadows a November Trumpocalypse. Finally, there's that schadenfreude again. A suspicion that the US has been sneered at for the past 240 years by an island that lost an empire but retained a superiority complex. A sense that the veil has been lifted and Britain has nothing left to feel superior about.

"In the Jane Austen novel of international life, we were supposed to be Marianne, the one with all the feelings," said the Washington Post, in a display of post-Brexit sensibility. "You were supposed to be Elinor, the sensible one ... We read all these books of yours about people in the countryside drinking tea for hours on end because we thought you knew better than we did! "

Being British used to have a cachet in the US - which Brexit has now destroyed. We're no longer Elinor, the sensible one. In the Jane Austen novel of international life, we are Fanny Price: the throwback no one respects.

Which is a shame, because Brand Britain was doing so well. A 2013 study found that Britain's international image had significantly improved over the past decade, with the 2012 London Olympics being a substantial catalyst. Pre-Olympics, the US saw the UK as "traditional", "unapproachable" and "restrained". Post-Olympics, it was "kind", "approachable" and more "caring".

The unprecedented stateside success of Downton Abbey and Sherlock, and the sudden availability of wider British programming via Netflix, helped spur major appreciation for British TV, culture and slang in the past few years. Harry Potter, of course, became synonymous with Britain for a generation of Americans who grew up on the books. Buzzfeed even helpfully explained Brexit to befuddled Americans in Harry Potter terms.

Britain has also been seriously investing in its brand, pouring £113.5m into the GREAT Britain campaign, launched in 2012. This was the UK's most ambitious marketing effort ever and the first really unified approach to promoting its image abroad. It largely consisted of British icons such as Bond, Beckham, Branson and Paddington Bear (an immigrant from Peru) alongside proclamations such as, "SPORT IS GREAT BRITAIN, CULTURE IS GREAT BRITAIN, INNOVATION IS GREAT BRITAIN". All in block capital letters, of course, so the foreigners could understand.

The irony of the GREAT campaign is that while the British government was going to such expense and effort to ensure the rest of the world understood its brand, it had no idea what Britain had actually become. A country divided and deflated by austerity; a kingdom united more by hate than by great. Perhaps the government should have spent less time worrying about its reputation abroad and more about its reality at home. Perhaps it should have focused more on its infrastructure than its image. Not that Britain should now scrap the marketing campaign entirely, however. With the pound depreciating so drastically, the government can quite truthfully tell American tourists that BRITAIN IS GREAT VALUE.
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In the US, Brexit has become a shorthand for 'Sorry your country failed' | Arwa Mahdawi

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Last week, in the wake of Brexit, a guy waylaid me near my apartment building. Was I voting in New York's congressional primaries, he wanted to know, flourishing flyers. "I can't," I explained, "I'm English." There was a pause. "Oh," he said, "I'm sorry. My condolences." Brexit has broken Brand Britain.

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Guest artist in my studio. Love you, S!

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Luke Harby is taking over NN's Project Space with Obsolete Portraits from Wednesday 20-Saturday 23 July 2016, 12-6pm. He will create a Polaroid portrait studio in the Project Space shooting exclusively on discontinued Polaroid film.

In 2008, Polaroid instant film was discontinued; a move instigated by the prediction that the product would quickly become obsolete in the digital age. Obsolete Portraits offers a first and last chance to experience this unique photographic format. The public is invited into NN's Project Space during gallery opening hours to have their portrait taken.

Alternatively visitors are welcome to come into the space and view the portraits taken so far and talk to the artist about his work, the process and Polaroid itself.

If you are an artist wanting to try something experimental, apply to use NN's Project Space. Click here for more information.

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Project Space: Luke Harby - NN Contemporary Art Northampton

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Luke Harby is taking over NN's Project Space with Obsolete Portraits from Wednesday 20-Saturday 23 July 2016, 12-6pm. He will create a Polaroid portrait studio in the Project Space shooting exclusively on discontinued Polaroid film. In 2008, Polaroid instant film was discontinued; a move instigated by the prediction that the product would quickly become obsolete in the digital age.

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embroidering for YOUR RELUCTANT DIPLOMAT reboot

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"It must be so nice sharing a studio with your husband! I bet you make such wonderful things together!"

"We literally have nothing in common."

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I hate talking politics so much that my parents believed I was apolitical/uninterested in politics until this year. Making my current work - standing in a room asking strangers to talk to me about politics - even weirder.

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video editing for YOUR RELUCTANT DIPLOMAT reboot

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gross