NEW EXHIBITION AT GRAND UNION WITH ALBERTA WHITTLE FOR THE BIRMINGHAM 2022 FESTIVAL

 

Launch event of the new exhibition

Grand Union, Birmingham launches a new exhibition Congregation (creating dangerously) by Alberta Whittle following the Birmingham 2022 Festival.

Congregation (creating dangerously) is a long term collaborative visual art project undertaken by Grand Union Gallery and Alberta Whittle for the Birmingham 2022 Festival. Through the use of  public sculpture, film, workshops, and community gardening with women's groups, Grand Union seeks to address issues of land justice, race, class, and gender, using the concept of congregation to consider notions of freedom and long-term healing.

Launching on Friday 2 September, Grand Union presents an exhibition of Alberta Whittle’s long-term body of work that draws together the different elements of the project as it reaches its term. Designed by fabrication studio MJM Bespoke (Birmingham), the gallery will be transformed into an active apothecary that holds space for healing and restoration through a programme of events and weekly gatherings. The exhibition will bring together Alberta Whittle’s two newly commissioned films – a culmination of 18 months of research, conversations & interviews. Alongside the films, we will present our long-term collaborative work with a group of women who have been building resilience through workshops, using the concept of congregation to consider notions of freedom and long-term healing.

The film element of Congregation is composed of two films, which will be screened in tandem in the gallery. The films combine conversations, performances, archival footage and interviews with and by Black women, non-binary people, and trans people; Alberta works towards processing trauma and colonial histories through forming oppressional, restorative, and healing  connections with the past via intergenerational conversations and gardening. A documentary film centres the important work by community activist Eunice McGhie-Belgrave, the founder of the community group Shades of Black (started in 1989 to unite a fractured community in Birmingham in the wake of the 1980 Handsworth Uprising) and features fellow activist and collaborator Sonia Hyman. The film explores the effectiveness of grassroots community building, direct community action and positive healing gardening practices, which addresses the wider issues of poverty in the city.

A still from the movie Congregation

Throughout its engagement, research, and production, Congregation has been a part of Grand Union’s community-led Growing Project, which connects people with each other through plants and their natural environment — producing this project with local community groups is an integral element of Alberta’s holistic work, offering a legacy that is rooted in community cohesion and care. Congregation is the product of long term collaboration between Alberta Whittle and a group of women who are supported by Midlands-based women’s organisations Anawim and Crisis Skylight Birmingham since March 2021, coming together weekly for workshops in the garden, facilitated by artists, gardeners and chefs. As part of these workshops, we have grown a public green space The Minerva Apothecary Garden adjacent to our gallery space in Digbeth on the banks of the Grand Union canal, full of healing herbs and plants. The space has been built by them and for them, and has become a source of healing – an apothecary – with a dedicated section for medicinal plants. Designed and constructed with MJM Bespoke to include planters, seating and outdoor cooking facilities, it is also a space for sharing, distributing and accumulating knowledge of plants including teas, oils,  ointments, compresses, tinctures and recipes as a free resource for local communities.

Earlier this year, Grand Union launched a new outdoor installation designed by MJM Bespoke in collaboration with artist Alberta Whittle, and Birmingham-based Women’s organisations. The sculpture has been created using the model of a Scottish bothy – a place which provides temporary shelter and is free for anyone to use – and a Barbadian Chattel House. The bothy is a shared public space that has been re-imagined and reinvented for people’s needs and, since its installation, it has become a place of congregation, community, celebration, and rest.

On Monday 1 August, Grand Union held the inaugural screening of Congregation, a large-scale film by Alberta Whittle, at St Phillips Cathedral. The film explores and tests the conditions of freedom under the hostile environment. In the context of Birmingham being the UK’s second most culturally diverse city and the host of the 2022 Commonwealth Games, there is a need now more than ever for art to anchor itself in sustenance, healing, witness, and critique. Alberta’s film commission is an inquiry into the function of cultural amnesia as it maintains structures of oppression, examining the colonial history of Birmingham, especially as it relates to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act.

The culmination of the project will be 2022 Harvest Festival, held on 16 September 2022 at Birmingham Cathedral, where Alberta, The Grand Union team, Growing Project participants, and other collaborators and community members will congregate to celebrate our communal efforts towards sustenance, shelter, witness, and serve a meal from the harvest of our community garden.

Image of the outside of the canal side gallery

Artist Alberta Whittle, said, “It feels so meaningful to return to my home city and present this new commission with Grand Union and Shades of Black for the Birmingham 2022 Festival. The past few years have been spent listening, learning and making bridges with new communities to think about how working together can resuscitate healing and hope. Tackling the complicated history of migration and extraction with these integral partners has been fundamental in how Grand Union, our communities and I have been working together on home building, with the creation of our canalside Bothy and our new film commission.”

Congregation (creating dangerously) is presented by the Birmingham 2022 Festival with generous support from Arts Council England and the National Heritage Lottery Fund. Further details about the programme can be found at https://grand-union.org.uk.