In Birmingham’s newly emerging cultural quarter, there is a billboard attached to the front of a building with an intriguing message. Written in Spanish, courtesy of New York based artist Liam Gillick, we are informed that ‘The Doors of the Administration Building are Now Open’. The administration refers to Birmingham’s new artist-led exhibition space Eastside Projects. Headed by Gavin Wade, Eastside Projects is an exciting, innovative and large-scale project space that takes radical exhibition precedents as its starting point. The gallery joins Vivid and Ikon Eastside in the area to form a formidable and extraordinary group of contemporary exhibition spaces never seen in Birmingham on this scale before.

Just walking through the door put you into direct contact with a specially commissioned artwork. Matthew Harrison’s attractive and functional door handle, titled Willkommen. Bienvenue. Welcome. C’mon in. is meticulously fashioned from an impressive list of exotic timbers – transporting you into a highly considered and constructed place to experience art.

Eastside Projects inhabits an industrial building that, whilst still typical to the area, seems to have been purpose built to exhibit art. The space is large and light with an expanse of concrete floor that gives the building the feel that this is a place where work is done and art is created. The industrial history of the area and the building link directly to Wade’s plans to position the gallery as a site of production. The way an environment is constructed and organised provides a framing for what is going on inside it, exhibitions and exhibition making, research, film, events, music and performance. The gallery seems to be positioning itself as a project making machine, with Wade describing the space as an ‘incubator of new ideas and forms for the city of Birmingham and beyond’.

The exhibition is developing gradually over the shows nine week run. This unusual way in which the show will progress from an empty space into a complete and complex gallery show takes its inspiration from three historical exhibitions. Peter Nadin’s continuous exhibition The Work Shown In This Space Is a Response To The Existing Conditions And/Or Work Previously Shown Within This Space (1979-80) contained works by artists such as Peter Fend and Lawrence Weiner (who have also created work for the Eastside show) who directly responded to each others work, developing a cumulative environment. This is the Gallery and the Gallery is Many Things’ title is adapted from This is the Show and the Show is Many Things (1994), an exhibition planned through workshops as a joint enterprise including artist Louise Borgeois and Luc Tuymans. Also providing a model for exhibition making is El Lissitsky’s groundbreaking Abstract Cabinet, 1926/1930. El Lissitsky generated a highly constructed environment for artworks by himself along with Piet Mondrian and Naum Gabo.

Covering the 225msq floor of the main gallery is a large white painted map by Berlin based USA artist Peter Fend. Political Economies After Oil: Proposal for Putin and Chavez in October 2008 is partly based on a conversation the artist had with Hugo Chavez in 2002. It also follows on from his collaboration with Jenny Holzer in 1980, Political Economies After Oil. The current work explores alternatives to energy production in a global political context. The floor of the gallery becomes a map identifying and detailing the best positions, or hotspots, to harvest algae for energy production, overseen by two images of Putin and Chavez. Thirty years on Fend’s initial comments on the fact we need to be considering alternative economies to the oil based structures we currently rely on still prove timely and pertinent food for thought 30 years later and position the artist as functional provider for our ecosystems.

Hanging above the main gallery is a second billboard, this time stating in Spanish that ‘The Whatnots of the Administration Are Now Open’, these statements, written by Gillick come across as a tongue in cheek comment on the bewildering and inaccessible ‘speak’of art world bureaucracies. Art and artists can often seem like ‘whatnots’ or thingamajigs to the uninitiated and Gillick seems to position this as a positive asset to market.

Tucked into the corner of the main gallery is a strange and wonderful redwood structure which is both artwork, gallery office and kitchen. Pleasure Island was originally commissioned for the Welsh Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and created by Heather and Ivan Morison by scaling up a fools gold crystal from Peru. The artists presented a startlingly shocking puppet show called I Love Pleasure Island on the opening night of the gallery which set new standards of depravity based on the classic punch and Judy model. Hopefully there will be more to come in Pleasure Island over the next few years! The piece certainly showcases how fiction, design, organization and architecture are forming an integral part of programming at the gallery and asks questions of how far art can be used within a space like this. Adjacent to Pleasure Island, in the Biennial scale cinema room, Guangzhou based Chen Shaoxiong’s monochromatic animated illustrations as films, Ink City, Ink Things and Ink Diary, bring a magical feel to the prosaic activities captured from the artists routine, punctuated with moments of political and private reverie. The soundtrack for Chen’s films also connect strongly with the evolving sound piece created by electronica duo ISAN for the inaugural exhibition. Sampling sounds collected from Eastside Projects and its surrounding area the musicians are adding an aural architecture which starts with two sound systems adding ‘drone’ and ‘texture’ to the space. One presumes melody, dischord and vocals may follow or perhaps that is the job of the other works in the show?

Upon walking into the large exhibition space I was struck by the apparent lack of recognizable ‘artwork’ and had to remind myself of two things: firstly that the exhibition will grow with new artworks added weekly and secondly, everything that you I can see in the building is an artwork. Or claims to be. From the door handle to the very structures housed within the space. Support Structure, formed by architect Celine Condorelli and Wade himself, have designed internal and external structures that will display and provide space to create work. The show as a whole presents an extraordinary format in which a collaboration of artworks can be collated and presented as one meta-artwork – the exhibition. The way in which this and future shows have been conceived of posits an idea that has been long neglected: that the physical space of the exhibition can produce as well as contain the exhibition.

Due for installation next week is a portaloo that will harvest human waste and generate power for the gallery, conceived of by Mark Titchner this eco-project resonates with ideas for alternative energy production brought up in Fend’s piece.

The show which exhibits nearly thirty artists in all over the nine week period is, at the time of writing this, in its early stages. It felt invigorating to be joining an exhibition as it is being created, as its narrative is being written. This growth process allows a new aspect of exhibition creating to come to the fore, exposing all involved to the fact that no matter how much planning is carried out, no one can really read the final chapter until Eastside Projects has written it.

Words: Fay Khan

Thursday to Saturday 12-5pm
Eastside Projects
86 Heath Mill Lane
Digbeth, Birmingham, B9 4AR
www.eastsideprojects.org