B-Side Multimedia Arts Festival

b-side is a biennial multimedia site specific arts festival, animating public spaces in Weymouth & Portland. The programme presents an ambitious, experimental, site-responsive and often quirky programme of artists commissions in sound, installation, visual art and live art in unusual locations across Weymouth & Portland, Dorset UK.

b-side multi media festival returns in 2012 with a double helping of intriguing events and artworks, intended to delight and provoke audiences this summer during the London Olympics . SHA is a curatorial partner helping to deliver this years programme.

Following the success of the b-side bus stops ‘ad’ campaign last September featuring local community heroes from Weymouth & Portland photographed by Andy Whale , this year London based artist Wendy Elia has been commissioned by b-side and SHA to paint a portrait of a local person who explores the extremes and limits of their body. The portrait will be reproduced as large posters to be displayed at various sites around Weymouth during the festival throughout the Olympic Games this summer. Wendy exhibited with Sherborne House Arts in 2009 as part of the Bodyscapes exhibition presented at Kube, Poole and Weymouth.

Other artists previously exhibiting with SHA and commissioned for this years festival include Day Bowman who will be producing new work for installation alongside the rail track at Weymouth Station and Stig Evans . Stig received a bursary from SHA in 2006 to produce work in collaboration with Andrew Hanson Senior Research Scientist from The National Physical Laboratory as part of the Colour + Chemistry project. For b-side Stig will be developing a colour library for Portland.

b-side multi media Festival will take place in Weymouth during the Olympic Sailing Events (27 July – 12 August) and on Portland during the Paralympics (29 August – 9 September).

For more detail and to sign up for updates www.b-side.org.uk