Castlefield Gallery and The Beating Wing Orchestra team up for The Manchester Weekender Festival. Forty-eight hours of art, culture, music, film, food, literature, walks, politics, poetry, photography, theatre, spectacle and games all wrapped up into a single weekend across Manchester.

The Beating Wing Orchestra, a Manchester based international music collective that includes musicians from refugee and migrant backgrounds will stage a one off performance within Turkish artists’ Osman Bozkurt and Didem Özbek’s ambitious, multi art form exhibition Life in the UK / Balance of Probabilities at Castlefield Gallery.

FREE EVENT. To book tickets for this event go to http://castlefieldgalleryandbeatingwingorchestra.eventbrite.com/

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The Beating Wing Orchestra is a Manchester based international music collective that includes musicians from refugee and migrant backgrounds. Countries of origin include England and Wales, Kurdistan and Cameroon, Bangladesh and Brazil. The band was brought together for the first Manchester International Festival in 2007 Festival to perform with composer Reem Kelani, and again in 2009 to collaborate with Amadou and Mariam. The groups unique refugee membership coupled with their recent collaborations with contemporary international artists make the Beating Wing Orchestra one of the most promising and creatively exciting groups operating in the North West and the UK today.

Life in the UK / Balance of Probabilities, a debut UK commission by Istanbul based artists Osman Bozkurt and Didem Ozbek of PiST/// for the Asia Triennial Manchester 2011. As the only artists to participate in the Triennial from Turkey, this project focuses on the issue of freedom of travel exploring one of the most salient issues of our time; the movement of people from one place to other parts of the world, whether for leisure or immigration.

For this ambitious multi artform project, PiST/// will transform the gallery into a temporary VISA Application Centre using the exterior and interior of the gallery as a mechanism to explore real stories fused with history and fiction. Examining the growth of the VISA industry in Istanbul as its starting point, the project that combines the theatrical and participatory with installation and film, will explore the radical impact that migration has had on demography, identity politics, global economic changes, community and belonging.

http://www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk/Default.asp?eKey=376&eP=1