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BIRMINGHAM MUSEUM & ART GALLERY
BMAG IS BACK, POP-UP STYLE
EDWARDIAN TEAROOMS AND GIFT SHOP REOPEN
Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery has unpacked a series of pop-up displays and live events that bring a different feel to the historic building for the Commonwealth Games and Birmingham 2022 Festival.
The Round Room, Industrial Gallery, Edwardian Tearooms, Gallery 10 and Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery Shop are now open seven days a week. The Bridge Gallery has also reopened to showcase items from the civic collection and invite feedback on what people want to see from the museum when it reopens fully in 2024 after all maintenance works have been completed.
The partial reopening is taking place while Birmingham City Council’s essential electrical works programme continues safely in other areas of the building.
PLACES TO GO
WHAT’S ON AT BMAG THIS SUMMER
All displays are at BMAG until it closes again at the end of 2022 for further maintenance
Animating the Round Room and Industrial Gallery, are Birmingham Music Archive, Fierce, Flatpack Projects, Kalaboration Arts and working in collaboration with Birmingham Museums – Don’t Settle, in partnership with Beatfreeks.
DON’T SETTLE: WE ARE BIRMINGHAM
Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery’s partial reopening launched with a radical transformation of the stunning Round Room. We Are Birmingham reflects the people of 21st Century
Birmingham. Co-curated by Birmingham Museums and a group of six young People of Colour from Don’t Settle, a project of Beatfreeks, the new display presents a vivid celebration of the city that Birmingham is now as well as aspirations of what the city could become.
BIRMINGHAM MUSIC ARCHIVE: IN THE QUE
A sensory exhibition celebrates one of Birmingham’s greatest music venues – the Que Club. Curated by Birmingham Music Archive and Pretty Hate Production, In The Que, features previously unseen photographs by critically acclaimed photographer Terence Donovan, personal artefacts, archive film footage, flyers and posters and a 35 minute documentary film.
FIERCE: SAVĀGE K’LUB: VĀ TAMATEA
New Zealand/Aotearoa artists Rosanna Raymond and Jaimie Waititi present a SaVĀge K’Lubroom in a secretive corner of Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. The installation reclaims the gentlemen’s clubs of the same name first established in London in the 19th century. SaVĀge K’Lub poses the question: what might it mean to be a savage today?
FLATPACK PROJECTS: WONDERLAND
Wonderland by Flatpack Projects and presented by Birmingham 2022 Festival explores how
PLACES TO GO: BMAG
cinema has shaped the streets, social lives and dreams of Brummies over the past 125 years. Flatpack plans to map all 150-plus cinemas in the city – from fairgrounds to multiplexes and from South Asian extravaganzas to popups. The display showcases photographs and cinema memorabilia, alongside magic lanterns and optical toys.
From the mid-1980s and over a period of two decades, artist and activist Mukhtar Dar, documented the struggles of Asian and African Caribbean communities against racism. Blacklash: Racism and the Struggle for Self-Defence, by Kalaboration Arts, draws on Mukhtar’s extensive archive.
UNPRECEDENTED TIMES
Finally, an additional exhibition invites visitors to take a moment to pause and reflect on all that has passed in Birmingham over the last two years of living with Covid-19. Unprecedented Times, developed in partnership with Birmingham City Council’s Public Health Division and Birmingham Museums’ Community Action Panel, will explore survival of the human spirit in public crises past and present.
