Manchester’s Aviva Studios: A new British arts venue tracks its city’s changes

LONDON – Since the late 1970s, Manchester, in the north of England, has been a focal point for British pop culture.

The city is still mostly known by the rest of the world for the bands it helped produce: Joy Division, New Order, The Stone Roses, Oasis and The Smiths all have ties there.

Now, a new multipurpose arts venue aims to cement Manchester’s reputation as a destination for the fine arts too. It marks how the city’s cultural scene has transformed in recent decades, from a site for do-it-yourself art-making to a desirable home for large-scale investment and corporate sponsorship.

Aviva Studios, named for the insurance company that provided some of the funding, welcomed its first visitors in a preview in late June, thanks to the multidisciplinary Manchester International Festival.

The creative director of the festival is

Singaporean Low Kee Hong

, who is also overseeing the opening of the venue.  Located in Manchester’s city centre, the building will open officially in October.

The venue is a huge, highly configurable space that includes a nearly 21m-high, 5,000-capacity warehouse venue and a 1,500-seat auditorium. It was initially named Factory International, after the local club night that became Joy Division and New Order’s record label, but a name change accompanied the announcement of Aviva’s sponsorship deal in June.

The new institution, largely funded with public money, now faces the problem of connecting to a city with an increasingly complicated identity.

After years of post-industrial decline, Manchester has recently had a development and property boom, with its city centre population ballooning, and tech companies Microsoft and Amazon opening large offices in the area. That prosperity, however, has not always been shared by the rest of the city.

In the Greater Manchester region, more than one-quarter of children were living in poverty in 2021, according to government data. The city is also more racially diverse than much of the rest of Britain.

“Manchester is, in a sense, a complicated public for elite arts to connect to, with very different populations,” said Mr Joshi Herrmann, founder of local newsletter The Mill. “Trying to find stuff that reaches across those different divides is really difficult.”

He pointed to recent projects that have tried: The Guardian’s Cotton Capital project, which analysed Manchester’s role in the slave trade; Manchester Museum’s curatorial shift to embrace the city’s South Asian population; and a spate of recent books that complicate dominant narratives around Oasis, Factory Records and the heady days of the Hacienda nightclub.

Aviva Studios “is a space for making and exploring the possibilities of new large-scale work”, said Mr John McGrath, its chief executive and artistic director.

The space opened its doors with You, Me And The Balloons, a site-specific installation by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.

It will host some of the festival’s performances, including those by psychedelic jazz band The Comet Is Coming and cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond, in summer. In October, Aviva Studios will hold its first in-house production – the Matrix-inspired dance show Free Your Mind, directed by British film-maker Danny Boyle.

Since before plans for the new venue were announced, the Manchester International Festival has been grappling with how to balance attracting artists from around the world with speaking to and representing local residents.

Founded in 2007, the festival was at first focused on mounting large-scale productions and bringing extraordinary work from around the world to Manchester, said Mr McGrath, who is also the festival’s artistic director.

In its early days, “there was a sense that the festival wasn’t necessarily connecting in a deep way with the city”, he added.

The biennial festival is still seen by many of Manchester’s residents as a niche cultural product, said Andy Spinoza, author of the 2023 book Manchester Unspun. He added that many of its productions were devised outside the city and were later exported to other international arts festivals.

Though the Aviva deal “enables the doors to open and the overrun of costs to be settled”, he said, the corporate sponsorship feels a long way from club nights at the Factory.

One clear benefit to the city is the jobs Aviva Studios is expected to create. Manchester’s City Council leader Bev Craig said the venue would add 1,500 direct and indirect jobs in the next decade, alongside the new Factory Academy, which trains local people for technical jobs within the creative industries.

Mr McGrath estimated the venue would generate £1.1 billion (S$1.9 billion) for the local economy over the next decade.

The venue is the largest investment in a single arts project by the British government since Tate Modern opened in 2000. Its cost has increased significantly, from £78 million when it was announced in 2014, to more than £210 million in the most recent City Council budget. NYTIMES