Manchester Art Gallery

A message from the exhibition curator

Our exhibition Derek Jarman Protest! was meant to open today and over the past 10 days I was meant to be working with the wonderful team of art technicians at the gallery hanging paintings, installing audio visual equipment, finalising labels and basically doing all the nuts and bolts stuff that happens just before an exhibition is due to open. We’ve been working in partnership with IMMA in Dublin, who opened the show last November and who were about to ship all the artworks to us when we both had to shut our doors. It’s very discombobulating to move from a place where you’re geared up for a physical installation and all that comes with it – in this case, not only the exhibition itself, but press events, a public preview event with drag queens from Haute Mess and some long-planned events with organisations and artists from our city looking at Jarman’s films, literature, painting and activism.

We’re working with our partners and the generous people and institutions who lent artwork to the show to look at rescheduling the exhibition.  In the meantime, in the absence of the physical exhibition we wanted to share some of the stories, artworks and film that we were planning to include.

Over the coming weeks and with the cooperation of some of our partners, including IMMA, HOME, Amanda Wilkinson Gallery, Basilisk Communications and LUMA we will update this page with writing, imagery, interviews, Q&As and links to Derek Jarman’s films, so watch this space…

Fiona Corridan, Curator Art & Design. 1 April 2020.

Watch Derek Jarman’s film, The Garden

HOME have announced a special deal with BFI Player for their Friends and Members, including streaming Derek Jarman’s film The Garden. There’s more details about the offer here.

A major retrospective of the work of one of the most influential figures in 20th century British culture.

PROTEST! is a major retrospective of the work of of one of the most influential figures in 20th century British culture, Derek Jarman (1942-1994).  The exhibition will focus on the diverse strands of Jarman’s practice as a painter, film maker, writer, set-designer, gardener and political activist. This is the first time that all of these strands of his practice will be brought together in over 20 years.  PROTEST! captures Jarman’s engagement with both art and society, as well as his contemporary concerns with political protest and personal freedoms arising from the AIDS crisis. Major bodies of work, from the 1960s to the 1990s, have been brought together; many of which have never been seen in public before.

Originally presented at IMMA, Dublin from 15 November 2019 – 23 February 2020, curated by Seán Kissane, the exhibition will be re-presented at Manchester Art Gallery by Curators Fiona Corridan, Manchester Art Gallery and author and filmmaker Jon Savage.

Derek Jarman, PROTEST! is organized by IMMA, Dublin, in partnership with Manchester Art Gallery, and is accompanied by additional projects at VOID, Derry, HOME, Manchester and John Hansard Gallery, Southampton.

The exhibition has been developed in close cooperation with the Keith Collins Will Trust, James Mackay and Amanda Wilkinson Gallery.

PROTEST!, published by Thames and Hudson 2020
IMMA and Thames and Hudson will publish a major new monograph on Derek Jarman to accompany the retrospective, covering Jarman’s artistic development as well as reflecting on his life and legacy. The book will feature contributions from Seán Kissane, Curator, IMMA; Sir Norman Rosenthal; Jonny Bruce, gardener and journalist; Professor Robert Mills, University of London; Jon Savage, author and filmmaker; Michael Charlesworth, an authority on landscape and the history of gardens and author of the book ‘Derek Jarman, Critical Lives’, and writers Olivia Laing and Philip Hoare.

Images

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