Student Protests Continue

The start of this week saw a third wave of student protests across the country, including here in the second city. On Tuesday, around 60 protesters entered Birmingham’s Council House and held a peaceful demonstration against the proposed rise in university tuition fees.

With former deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, Vince Cable stating earlier this week he may abstain from the vote – despite currently being the minister responsible for universities – the issue now looks more complicated than ever.

The Lib Dems had garnered a lot of student support in the brief pre-election period of Cleggmania (remember that), and while it is debatable what proportion of that was down to their tuition fees pledge, it is certainly an issue which will have lost the party ground with that particular demographic.

One of the major arguments leveled at the proposals, is that it would contravene efforts for social inclusion and create an elitist institution of universities, with poorer students being priced out of attending certain establishments, regardless of their ability. Universities would be able to charge up to £9,000 per year for fees, almost three times the current cap and an increase of almost nine times the amount from the middle of the decade. Another issue, is that any proposed rise would likely see students without the support of wealthy parents graduate with over £20,000 worth of personal debt.

Coalition members have stated that Universities charging higher fees would need to prove what steps they are taking to encourage students from poorer backgrounds to attend and have schemes in place to support these students. However regardless of this, it would be difficult to argue that a more obvious hierarchical system would not arise, and that many capable students might prefer to look elsewhere than get the best education available to them at the cost of thousands of pounds of debt.

Comedian Ed Byrne claimed last week on Young Voters Question Time that the proposals were an attempt to enforce a free market economy on the education system, which effectively missed the point of how students actually select their educational institute. After all choosing a university is not (and should not be) like choosing a bottle of ketchup.

Students at Birmingham’s University’s and beyond are sure to join the rest of the country in keeping a keen eye on the developments over the coming weeks and months. It is unclear exactly when the voting will take place but it will be interesting to see how the Lib Dems handle another incident of ‘backtracking’ from their pre-election pledges.

There has been a level of negativity regarding the way in which some have chosen to protest, with one particular incident involving a fire extinguisher getting a lot of attention. While it is fair to say that excessive violence should never be condoned, the media coverage that particular protest and the subsequent Day X protests have drawn has been substantial. This raises the age old question of people’s right to protest, and whether solely peaceful protests truly catch the attention they desire. Those who have been maligned in the media during recent weeks, might find themselves portrayed in a different light if things now go their way.

Pictures of today’s student protest at the University of Birmingham

Crowds of 200+ attended the rally against the rise in tuition fees

A student march on the University of Birmingham

 

Students on the balcony of the Aston Webb Building

 

Students protesting in the doorway of the Aston Webb

Protesters outside the door of the Aston Webb

Police blocking entry to Aston Webb

Breaking News: students occupy University of Birmingham’s Great Hall

There was a police presence at the University of Birmingham today as a number of student protesters occupied the University’s centrepiece building, the Aston Webb Great Hall, in protest against the forthcoming rise in  tuition fees and cuts to higher education.  Students gained entry to a roof of the building above the main entrance and draped banners calling for David Eastwood, the University’s Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor and a vocal supporter of the controversial Browne Review into higher education, to resign.  All lectures and events due to take place in the building have been cancelled on the insistence of University security.

The protests are a major embarrassment to Eastwood and the University as they coincide with an open day for prospective undergraduates.  The protesters argue the rise in tuition fees will prevent students from poorer backgrounds from attending Russel Group universities such as Birmingham.  There are more protests scheduled to take place throughout the day, both at Birmingham and at a national demonstration to be held in London.  The University of Birmingham released a statement saying ‘the police are working with our security team to ensure the safety of about 20 people protesting on a balcony’ in what was ‘a challenging time for all in higher education’.

15th September, The Drum Arts Centre: The Handsworth Rebellions: Revisiting Handsworth 25 Years On

This September marks 25 years since two days of disturbances in Handsworth, events that, alongside similar unrest in Tottenham, Brixton and Toxteth, were described by the then Metropolitan Police Chief as ‘the worst rioting ever seen on the mainland’.

 

Scene from the disturbances in Handsworth

 

The University of Birmingham in partnership with the Drum would like to invite you to a seminar that will attempt to contextualise the rebellions by examining some key aspects of life in 1980s Handsworth.  The seminar will consist of a panel of academics, artists and activists – chaired by Dr Robert Beckford – who will shift focus away from the reasons for the rebellions and on to the cultural, political and intellectual contexts of Handsworth during the period. What were the main political developments in Handsworth at this time? What were the key social institutions fostering a sense of community? How did events in Handsworth relate to wider politics of black identities and Black Britons?

Confirmed panellists include Mike Grant (formerly of the reggae band Musical Youth), Yvonne Mosquito (Labour councillor for Nechells since 1996), Mukhtar Dar (artistic director of the Drum) and Chas Critcher and Tony Jefferson (co-authors of the seminal cultural studies text, Policing the Crisis).

The aim of the seminar is for panellists and members of the audience alike to share their own perspectives on these themes and in doing so, come to a better understanding of what is a key period in contemporary British history.

This event takes place at 7 p.m. on Wednesday the 15^th of September at the Drum arts centre, Aston.  Admission is free and refreshments will be served.

Photographing Handsworth: a new exhibition of photographic history

This September sees the launch of an exhibition that explores the way in which photography has been used to represent Handsworth, a district of Birmingham to the north west of the city centre. September 2010 marks 25 years since two days of disturbances in Handsworth caused two people to lose their lives, many injuries and much damage to property.  The events were an important contributor to powerful and negative stereotypes about the area whereby Handsworth regularly became associated with criminality and acts of violence.  As the novelist Salman Rushdie put it shortly after the disturbances: ‘if you say “Handsworth”, what do you see?  Most Britons would see fire, riots [and] looted shops’.

Rather than dwell on these negative images of Handsworth, the exhibition focuses on the ways in which different photographers have attempted to create a more accurate picture of life in the area.  The images shown at the exhibition are testament to the particularly rich photographic tradition that the Handsworth area has inspired.  This tradition stretches back more than fifty years and, when taken together, these photographs can be thought about as a sort of visual history of Handsworth and the people who live there.

On the one hand, the exhibition looks back at this visual history.  It showcases the work of documentary photographers such as George Hallett, Derek Bishton and Vanley Burke, artists whose photographs of Handsworth have gone on to receive international acclaim.

Photograph by Amzad Hussain, Holte Visual & Performing Arts College

But the exhibition is also about focusing on the nature of Handsworth in 2010, marrying Handsworth’s photographic tradition with an emphasis on the contemporary.  In the run up to the exhibition, Vanley Burke ran a workshop with a group of year nine pupils at Holte Visual and Performing Arts School in Lozells.  He showed them some basic camera techniques and gave them each a disposable camera with which to go about recording there everyday lives in Handsworth and Lozells.

Handsworth Self Portraits, 1979

In summer 1979, Derek Bishton and his colleagues Brian Homer and John Reardon set up a makeshift studio on the street outside their shared premises in Grove Lane, Handsworth.  Outside the studio was a sign asking passers-by to come in and take their own portrait; inside, the photographers attached the camera to a long cable release, thus giving participants control over how and when they took their photograph.  This was the final way the exhibition seeks to marry Handsworth’s photographic tradition with an emphasis on the contemporary in Handsworth: over two Saturdays in summer 2010 the self-portrait set up was recreated in Handsworth, both inside Handsworth Library and outside on the Soho Road.

Handsworth Self Portraits, 2010

Like the original project 31 years ago, what these photographs represented were snapshots of the diversity and true vibrancy of life in Handsworth.  It is important to recognise that these are histories that need to be told.  As each of the photographs featured in the exhibition show, photography is a good way of telling them.

Photographing Handsworth: Representing Handsworth 25 Years On is being shown from 2-14 September at Handsworth Library, Soho Road (Mon 9-5, Tues 9-5, Thu 12-7, Fri 9-5 & Sat 9-5) and from 22 Sept-29 Oct at the University of Birmingham, Aston Webb Rotunda (Mon-Fri 9-5).  Admission is free.

Exploitation in the Cultural Sector: unpaid internships in Birmingham’s cultural industries

Andy Burnham, the Labour MP for Leigh and former culture secretary, has placed at the heart of his campaign for the Labour leadership the issue of social mobility.  Burnham argues that whilst Labour ‘did a great job in getting young people from all backgrounds to university’, they ‘didn’t do enough to help those ordinary kids without well-connected parents onto the ladder of the major professions’.

As an example of this failure, Burnham cites the continued predominance of unpaid internships in certain industries whereby young people are expected to work for little or no pay in order to attain the required experience to apply for paid employment.

Burnham: plans to make all internships paid

Such posts often come with significant responsibilities and full-time hours of work, meaning young people have no way of supporting themselves financially other than through the help of parents or relatives, thus effectively excluding people from less well-off backgrounds.

Burnham pointed to the BBC as an example of the kind of practice he’d like to stop.  ‘There are young people working within the BBC for long periods without pay’, he said.  ‘This is not fair to them, but more importantly it excludes many others who simply don’t have the means to support themselves’.

It is not only within the BBC that this practice is widespread.  It is common throughout journalism, the financial industries and, increasingly, the cultural industries.  With money traditionally tight in the cultural sector, and museums and galleries an easy target in a climate of austerity, different cultural industries are increasingly turning to enthusiastic young university graduates to carry out for free duties that would ordinarily command a significant fee.

Examples abound of such practice in Birmingham.  The art collective VIVID, for example, regularly advertise for positions working on projects with no financial reward whatsoever.  Punch Records have recently advertised for the post of project assistant, a yearlong contract entailing a four-day working week but paying just £25 per day (roughly £3 per hour).

On the one hand, such schemes take advantage of the enthusiasm of young people looking to get a foot in the door of the various cultural industries.  There is rarely any guarantee of a properly paid job at the end of the internship or ‘apprenticeship’, and young people are often forced into bouncing from one unpaid position to the next for months, even years in an effort to impress would-be employees.

On the other hand, these schemes help ensure that only a certain section of society are able to work in the cultural sector – namely those who can afford to work for free for as long as possible.  This is wrong in any sector, but it is particularly wrong in the cultural sector as in the long run it will ultimately lead to a British arts and cultural scene hopelessly out of sync with the diversity of modern Britain. It is not just the BBC that is ‘hideously white’.

This is the catch-22 facing the cultural sector in Birmingham and beyond: organisations like VIVID and Punch want to and do implement numerous exciting projects, yet at the same time they are seemingly reliant upon unpaid labour in order to do so, and therefore end up restricting the next generation of cultural practitioners to those from certain backgrounds.  As cuts begin to bite, this situation is only going to be magnified in the coming years.

It is clear that something needs to be done to rectify this situation. The loophole that excludes internships and apprenticeships from the national minimum wage needs to be closed down in order to protect young people from effectively being exploited.  But equally we don’t want exciting and cutting-edge organisations to fold under the financial burden.  There must be a situation where cultural organisations are funded well enough to pay their employees – interns, apprentices, part-time, full-time – fairly, just like in any other industry.  But this is not simply about fairness – it’s about the direction of Britain’s arts and cultural life for the next generation.

The Moseley Folk Festival: keeping alive Moseley’s bohemian tradition

The Moseley Folk Festival returns for a fifth year this September with attractions including the Divine Comedy, Donovan and folk veterans the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.  After the success of the last two festivals (both were sell outs), this year’s event promises to be the best ever, with a winning combination of well-known acts and local, up-and-coming talent, all held in the plush surroundings of Moseley Park.

The festival keeps alive a well-worn tradition of Moseley as Birmingham’s bohemian quarter.  Carl Gervais, co-organiser of the team that also staged the highly successful Mostly Jazz Festival earlier this summer, told InBirmingham about the significance of staging the event in Moseley.  ‘Since the 1960s Moseley has always had a bit of a bohemian vibe’, he says.  ‘There are a lot of music fans in the area, as well as musicians, and with the melting pot of cultures people seem open minded and welcome to different kinds of music’.

The festival picks up from where L’Esprit Manouche left off in Moseley in 2005.  Whereas the latter focused mainly on gyps jazz, this year’s folk festival showcases folk and blues old and new and from near and far.  Whilst the Ukulele Orchestra have been going strong since 1985 and can count David Bowie amongst their celebrity fans, Fyfe Dangerfield’s debut solo album ‘Fly Yellow Moon’ has received widespread critical acclaim.  Alongside the music, award-winning ales will be served from the Purity Brewery in Studley, Warwickshire.

Tickets for the festival are on sale now and can be purchased here.

Lords of the Dance

A Birmingham duo who were crowned Lords of the Dance at a competition in June have revealed their joy at winning in front of their home crowd.

Steadiflux performing at the Barclays Live event

Nathan Marsh, 18, from Bartley and Jordan Breakspear, 19, from Harborne emerged as eventual winners in the Barclays Live, Birmingham Heat after wowing a panel of celebrity judges.

The boys, known collectively as Steadiflux, received a cheque for £1000 as well as VIP tickets to see one of their judges and Stricly Come Dancing star, Brendan Cole perform live.

The pair, who are both students, are now hoping to continue their good fortune and dance their way to more widespread recognition.

“Birmingham has a really good dance scene so it feels like a huge achievement to come first place. It was also great performing because we had an amazing response from the crowd,” they said.

Adding, “We’re always trying to become better dancers so we’ll continue training and choreographing, which also means we’ll have material to enter for more competitions and events.”

Other talents on show at the event included UK hiphop heavyweights Smash Broz and Britain’s Got Talent semi-finalists Mini-Mezzos.

Judge Brendan Cole said of the talented twosome: “Congratulations to Steadiflux for winning the Barclays Live Birmingham heat. They are a very innovative dance duo and worthy winners – I wish them all the best for the future.”

You can watch the full competition winning performance here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT168Z2v0nE

The competition has also hit London and Bristol in recent weeks, to find out more visit the facebook page at: http://www.facebook.com/barclayslive

SmashBroz take to the floor

Photography in Birmingham: a review of three exhibitions

By Kieran Connell

There are a number of interesting photography exhibitions on show in the city at the moment.  Although the type of photographs being shown at the exhibitions differ greatly, they each in their own way raise certain important questions about photography as a genre and the ways in which it can be exhibited in cities such as Birmingham.

A major exhibition currently on is a retrospective of the work of photo-journalist Steve McCurry at the Museum & Art Gallery’s Waterhall.  Having started taking photographs seriously in the mid-1970s, McCurry is best known for the breathtaking scenes he photographs in war-zones such as Cambodia, the Philippines and Afghanistan.

Copyright: Steve McCurry

As a travel photographer, McCurry’s aim is to show things his western audiences will never have seen before.  This can be landscapes, as with his photograph of a religious shrine in Cambodia, or people, as with the world famous portrait of the ‘Afghan girl’ with the strikingly beautiful eyes.  Wherever these photographs are displayed, whether on the walls of art galleries or on the pages of National Geographic, where McCurry features regularly, they are always accompanied by labels informing us exactly what is going on, and most importantly, where.  For McCurry, this is the point of his work.  Wherever he is, there are things, moments that must be ‘captured’ and shown, before they disappear.  ‘This is what drives the photographer’, he writes.  ‘The gnawing sense that “this is it”’.

This idea that photography is a means of capturing moments is taken to extremes in the work of Harold E. Edgerton, currently being exhibited by the Ikon and Birmingham Central Library in a disused shop in the Pallasades.  The exhibition is part of the Ikon’s 1970s season looking back at some of the art it displayed in the period, and is situated nearby to a premises the Ikon once occupied during the ‘70s.

Copyright: Harold Edgerton

Whilst McCurry aimed to capture spectacular moments in exotic places, Edgerton focuses his attention on capturing the more mundane scenes we all see every day, but in ways we have never seen before.  Edgerton was a scientist by trade, and in the 1930s he invented a photographic process that could project a flash 120 times a second, thus enabling moments such as the kicking of a rugby ball, or the drop of milk into a bowl, to be captured in miniscule detail.  The photographs are so accurate, to a thousandth of a second, such largely familiar scenes are made to appear strange and, in a way diametrically opposed to McCurry’s photography, even exotic.

The final exhibition of photography currently on in the city exhibits the work of New York publican Sheldon Nadelman.  For ten years during the 1970s and ‘80s Nadelman ran the Terminal Bar in Manhattan, a place renowned for being the hang-out of choice for people on the fringes of mainstream society – pimps, drag queens, down and outs.  Throughout these years Nadelman set about creating a remarkable photographic record: he photographed his clients as they sat, drank and smoked in his bar.

Copyright: Sheldon Nadelman

A selection of the more than 2,500 images Nadelman took are currently on display at Trove, the old science museum on Newhall Street.  They are not obviously scenes from a bar but rather are close ups of faces, portraits of the people that made the Terminal the bar it was.   At Trove, essentially an empty warehouse, the photographs are pinned to boards and so from a distance, they appear as a sea of unknown faces.  There are no labels accompanying the images, and it would be difficult to determine that they were taken in a bar at all.  However without any form of mediation, the emphasis in these images is solely on the people, and as you get up close to them and study these nameless faces that they have their most powerful effect.  You begin to see recurring faces in the selection, and often speculate on each person’s story, their lives and relationships with each other.  Although these are people you have of course never met, the stories you construct for them makes them seem somehow familiar – these are not strangers but friends staring contently – and sometimes drunkenly – back at you.

Copyright: Steve McCurry

These exhibitions each provide insights into the various ways photography has and continues to be used as a way of recording aspects of the human condition.  It is almost treated as a way of immortalising scenes or people for future generations.  If McCurry’s style is that of an adventure-photographer, seeking out pictures in far-off places, both Edgerton and Nadelman focus their lenses much closer to home, on the everyday or the mundane.  Both McCurry’s and Nadelman’s photographs also raise particularly vexed questions in relation to the ethics of photography – the relationship between the western eye and the ‘Other’, or of the uneven relationship between photographer and photographed.  Did the ‘Afghan girl’, or any of Nadelman’s drinkers for that matter, have any idea their images would be shown in galleries – of whatever kind – around the world?

This is the other crucial point that these three exhibitions each allude to.  The diversity of venues for each shows the advantages of thinking outside of the box when it comes to showcasing photography – or art of any kind – in a city like Birmingham.  McCurry’s exhibition has been heavily promoted across the city, and as a result has received excellent attendances. A venue such as Trove strips away some of the formalness of conventional art galleries and allows you to experience art in a less mediated way.  Finally, taking art out of the art gallery altogether and placing in it venues such as the shopping malls allows you to reach new audiences entirely.  In the current climate of cuts, and with the arts a prime target, these exhibitions provide a blueprint for the imaginative thinking required in Birmingham for it to move ahead.

The Steve McCurry retrospective is on at BMAG until the 17th of October; The Harold Edgerton exhibition is on until the 5th of September in the Pallasades Shopping Centre; the Sheldon Nadelman exhibition can be seen by appointment only at Trove (old science museum) – visit trove.org.uk for details

The final installment…InBirmingham in NYC

By James Bagan

It was the one part of our trip that I was looking forward to the most and it didn’t disappoint. Most of us have seen films like The Godfather or Taxi Driver and scenes in those films just make you wonder what New York has to offer – it’s intriguing and it is almost intimidating. I accept, those two films don’t paint the prettiest picture of New York but they’re the first that came to mind. I’m not much of a ‘movie buff’. Nevertheless, walking around Manhattan for the first time – it was a feeling that won’t escape me for a long time yet.

We’d just travelled from Queens where the night time was almost busier than the day – probably for the wrong reasons.  Plenty of people had told me beforehand “it’s exactly what you think it’s like” and it really rang true. Yellow cabs everywhere, thousands of people walking the streets, locals and tourists. The heat hit us straight away, very muggy, very humid, we’d walked head first into a heatwave. And then, right in front of us was the New York Times building.

I need to mention is the manner in which we arrived in New York. Unbelievable. We’d hired a car and had it for no more than 30 hours, with the final drop off point being in Manhattan, 11th Street.  That, without doubt, was the most difficult thing (practically speaking) I’ve ever done… but the feeling was incredible. Driving to and through New York, with my two best friends, listening to The Strokes and Oasis. What more could I want?

Whilst there, our days were filled with walking, seeing the sights of New York. Whether it was The Statue of Liberty, The Dakota, Times Square (where we randomly bumped Man City coach Brian Kidd) Broadway, The Museum of Modern Art, Central Park, Ground Zero or 5th Ave, we saw and did as much as we could.  The evenings offered something different, ranging from friendly ‘local’ bars to places where being offered a white line, with the back drop of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, was customary. I declined.

It was a busy 4 days that we spent there – of course we wanted to see everything we could and do everything we wanted. In all honesty, another 4 days would have still probably not been enough to see Manhattan in all its glory. And then we’d still have Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx and Staten Island to conquer… we had our highs, and our lows (which 3 best friends don’t?) but what we did have was an incredible time together.

We saw all sides of New York life – from the highs of being able to walk Times Square marvelling at the ‘Big Apple’ that we were lucky enough to experience, to the lows of seeing how the poor suffer in one of the richest cities in the world. You begin to question how this could happen but you quickly realise that it’s just life. Unfortunately it happens everywhere.

New York, New York.