Students and Staff from the School of Digital Arts (SODA) recently showcased their work at Viewpoints Photography Festival.
The festival featured workshops, talks and public exhibitions held across various venues in Manchester. Second year students from BA (Hons) Photography were tasked with planning, curating and marketing their own exhibitions across Manchester city centre, working collaboratively to create thematic exhibitions based off the unit brief ‘Off the page’.
Lilie-Anne Caley was part of a group who curated one of these exhibitions named Tension. She explained how her and her fellow students explored this theme: “We wanted to explore how each of us experiences or interprets tension, and combining this with our unit brief ‘off the page’, we have created an exhibition which mixes photography with physicality. Many of us looked to ourselves and our lived experience with internal tension, such as learning to live with ADHD, while others looked at it in society, exploring a relationship between two individuals in the countryside and the city”.
A key element of the festival process was learning to work within different exhibition spaces. Lilie-Anne explained what steps the team behind Tension took to familiarise themselves with their venue, Terrace NQ: “We have been very lucky that we have been able to get into our space for seminars instead of doing them on campus, which has been invaluable. It meant we could get into the space and see how everyone’s work fits together, and experiment with different ways of adhering work to the walls, windows and floors. This also meant that come installing, it was a more streamlined process, and we all helped each other out where we could”.
The unit is aimed at bringing together students to work collaboratively in a real life environment while responding to a live brief. Lilie-Anne commented that this collaboration played a huge role in her learning process: “A big takeaway for all of us was appreciating the community within not just our group but the whole year group, which has formed out of this unit. We’ve learnt to trust each other more and ask for advice and criticism without fearing judgment. For me personally, I’ve learnt to trust the process more and have faith that everything will work out, provided you put the effort in. The whole unit has been invaluable, really, and it’s been a brilliant opportunity to develop our professional skills outside of university too”.
Photos by Hollie Jayne Harrison
