33 Revolutions was a series of events, performances, screenings and exhibitions which took place at Vivid Projects and other locations throughout 2013.

Revolution 01: Ladies and Gentleman, How Long Will They Last

This commission – comprised of performance, sound and spectacle by artist Justin Wiggan, British dancer/choreographer Rosie Kay and Brazilian dancer Guilherme Miotto – saw a couple dancing over a ten-hour period, physically and emotionally holding each other up, a metaphor for the gruelling strains of the cancer and its and treatment.

Revolution 02: Dirty New Media

Curated with Antonio Roberts in association with the Univerisity of Birmingham, Dirty New Media included performances and interactive installations in the form of hacked and customised hardware, accessories, demos, lectures, data-mangling, projection and more from digital artists, hacktivists and new media explorers from the West Midlands, GLI.TC/H Chicago and beyond.

Revolution 03: Oh, To Be In England

Oh To Be In England presented three contrasting films: Nightcleaners, Who Shot The Sheriff? and A Dream From The Bath, that make a forceful comment on our social experience through documentary sources, the domestic environment and the power of collective action.

Revolution 04: Birmingham Arts Lab Sessions

Commissioned by artist Trevor Pitt, seven people were selected by Vivid Projects and Flatpack Festival who were considered key to the 1968–77 Birmingham Arts Lab cultural revolution. One to one sessions took place with these former Arts Lab members, from which an audio installation was created inspired by the work of Jolyon Laycock, who established the in-house Sound Workshop in 1970.

Revolution 05: The Catapult Club Archive

A highly personal three day show to celebrate Record Store Day 2013, The Catapult Club Archive showcased 24 years of Birmingham’s music history with a special collection of handmade cassette demos, posters and memorabilia sent to the Catapult Club over the past 24 years, alongside live footage shot across countless gigs at The Jug of Ale. The exhibition featured material from some of Birmingham’s best including Ocean Colour Scene, Editors, King Adora, Broadcast, and Pram.

Revolutions 06–09: Hold Your Ground

Hold Your Ground featured a major new film by UK based artists Karen Mirza and Brad Butler alongside songs, interviews and street art from artists, filmmakers and activists in Cairo. It opens up the question: What is the place of art in a revolution?

Revolutions 10–13: The English Underground

This exhibition drew together works from three strikingly independent filmmakers: Richard Heslop, Marc Karlin and Derek Jarman, key to the radical trajectory of the post-1976 English underground movement with a shared background in collective and non-hierarchical working methods, experimentation with video image manipulation and found materials.

Revolution 14: Alan Lomax Archive

An evening of films, stories and images from the Mississippi Records and Alan Lomax Archive as told by Mississippi Record’s founder, Eric Isaacson.

Revolutions 15–17: Forward Back Together

A commission from artist Simon Pope exploring the material transformations of Raymond Mason’s Forward (1991), commissioned by the city council, given as a gift to the people of Birmingham and later destroyed by that very same ‘public’.

Revolution 18: David Bowie

Immerse yourself in the sound and vision of a man whose influence is apparent in both punk and soul, on Madonna and Jarvis Cocker; on street style and sexuality. As Charles Shaar Murray observes, “who else has duetted with Bing Crosby and dabbled in drum-and-bass, recorded with both Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Pet Shop Boys, produced both Lou Reed and Lulu?” with contributions from Leon Trimble, Chromatouch.

Revolutions 29-32: Rebel Girl

In the early 1990s, long before social media and blogs, a revolution started in Olympia (US). An uprising of bright, angry girls broadcast their solidarity by way of art, activism and a DIY aesthetic in the form of Riot Grrrl. Combining moving image, documentary, music and discussion, Rebel Girl brings together artists, writers, speakers and makers to explore the legacy of Riot Grrrl twenty years on from Kathleen Hanna’s Riot Grrrl manifesto.

Bring Your Own Beamer

In a one-night event curated by Antonio Roberts, artists armed with projectors, beamed responses to Vivid Projects’ eight-month opening season, 33 REVOLUTIONS, onto the walls of the space, creating a collective Revolution 33 through a giant audio-visual environment. Exhibiting artists included: Pete Ashton, George Benson, Dom Breadmore, Ashley James Brown, David Checkley, chromatouch, Roxie Collins, Vlad C Costache, DACHHU VISUALS, faisfx, Soraya Fatha, Anna Horton, Sebastian Lenton, Michael Lightborne, Sam Alexander Mattacott, Mark Murph, Tim Neath, Walter Newton, Natalie O’Keeffe, Chris Plant, Antonio Roberts, Daniel Salisbury, Sellotape Cinema, Dan Tombs, and Ben Waddington.

Call to Arms: Films on the Black Panther Party

Bristol Radical Film Festival joined us for a special screening of films on the Black Panther Party, a black revolutionary socialist organisation active in the United States from 1966 to 1982. The programme included Eldridge Cleaver: Black Panther [dir: William Klein, 1970] and Who Are the Angola 3? [dir: Hugo Levien].

Scalarama: The Films of the Kuchar Brothers

In partnership with Flatpack Festival and Scalarama, we screened a selection of 16mm films by twin brothers from The Bronx, Mike and George Kuchar including Hold Me While I’m Naked, The Secret of Wendell Samson, The Craven Sluck and Mongreloid.

Free School – Poetry, Carnival, Politics

Curated by Ian Sergeant, Poetry, Carnival, Politics aimed to interrogate notions of art, revolution and the controversial figure that was Michael X, through music, film and spoken word. The programme explored the complexities of the burgeoning black community’s experience of life in Britain during the 50s and 60s adopting the principal of the revolutionary ‘London Free School’, a community action group launched in 1966 in Notting Hill, opening up Vivid Projects space for artists and the public to create their own dialogue.

View the full 33 Revolutions poster print catalogue by Keith Dodds below: