A new British art venue follows the changes in the city

Manchester, in the north of England, has been a focal point of British pop culture since the late 1970s. The city is still best known to 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 to the city.

Now a new multi-purpose arts venue aims to make Manchester a fine arts destination as well. It marks how the city’s cultural scene has transformed over the past few decades, from a DIY art-making site to a covetable home for large-scale investment and corporate sponsorship.

Aviva Studios, named after the insurance company that provided part of the financing, will open in Manchester city center at the end of this month. It is a huge, highly configurable space with a nearly 22-foot-tall warehouse facility with a capacity of 5,000 and a 1,500-seat auditorium. It will also provide permanent home to the multi-disciplinary Manchester International Festival.

The venue 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 on Tuesday.

The expensive new institution, largely funded by public money, now faces the problem of fitting in with a city with an increasingly complex identity.

After years of post-industrial decline, Manchester has recently experienced a development and property boom, with the city center population booming and Microsoft and Amazon opening large offices in the area. But that prosperity has not always been shared by the rest of the city, and in the Greater Manchester area, more than a quarter of children will live in poverty by 2021. according to government data. The city is also more racially diverse than much of the rest of Britain.

“Manchester, in a way, is a complicated audience for elite arts to connect with, with very different populations,” said Joshi Herrmann, founder of The mill, a local newsletter. “Trying to find things that span across those different divides is really, really hard.”

Herrmann pointed to recent projects that have tried: The Guardian’s “Cotton Capitalproject, which analyzed Manchester’s role in the slave trade; The Manchester Museum curators’ shift to embrace the city’s South Asian population; and a series of recent books that complicate dominant narratives around Oasis, Factory Records, and the heady days of the Haçienda nightclub.

Aviva Studios “is a space for creating and exploring the possibilities of new large-scale work,” said John McGrath, the site’s CEO and Artistic Director. The space opens on June 30 with “You, me and the balloons”, a site-specific installation by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, and some festival performances will take place this summer, including that of the psychedelic jazz band The comet is coming and the comedian Justin Vivian Bond.

The first in-house production — the “Matrix”-inspired dance show “Clear your headdirected by Danny Boyle – will be the centerpiece of a nine-day “welcome party” for Aviva Studios in October.

Before plans for the new venue were announced, the Manchester International Festival struggled with how to balance attracting artists from around the world with speaking to and representing local residents. Founded in 2007, the festival was initially very focused on mounting large-scale productions and “bringing extraordinary work from around the world to Manchester,” said McGrath, who is also the festival’s artistic director. In the early days, “there was a sense that the festival didn’t necessarily have a deep connection with the city,” he added.

The biennial festival is still seen by many Manchester residents as “a niche cultural product,” says Andy Spinoza, the author of the book “Manchester Unpunched.” He said many of his productions were conceived outside the city and later exported to other international arts festivals. While the Aviva deal “allows the doors to open and handle cost overruns,” he said, the corporate sponsorship feels “a long way” from club nights at the Factory.

A clear benefit to the city is the jobs Aviva Studios is expected to create. Manchester City Council leader Bev Craig said the site would create 1,500 direct and indirect jobs over the next decade, alongside the new Factory Academy, which trains local people for technical jobs in the creative industries. McGrath estimated that the site would generate £1.1 billion or $1.4 billion for the local economy over the next ten years.

The venue is the largest investment in a single art project by the UK government since the Tate Modern opened in 2000. Costs have increased significantly, from £78 million when it was announced in 2014to over £210 million in the most recent municipal budget.

Manchester local government provided about half of that total, and the venue also received £106 million from the national government (through the Treasury and Arts Council England) plus £9 million a year for running costs. The multi-year deal with Aviva added a further £35 million, The Guardian reportedthat city council documents as of the October show, will be spent in part on paying back council loans.

Aviva Studios opens as public funding for art in Britain is increasingly redistributed, from London to the rest of the country and from larger institutions to smaller ones. In November, Arts Council England announced that organizations such as the English National Opera and the Barbican Center would lose their government grants. This was part of the UK government’s commitment, announced in February last yearto more cultural investment and access to the arts outside London.

While the Manchester site represents a significant investment in the arts outside London, it is still an example of funding being funneled into a large, centralized institution.

In a sense, Aviva Studios completes the Manchester festival’s transition from what Spinoza describes as a “guerrilla art movement that makes use of found spaces in the city” to the “grand institutional building of today”, as both art funding and Manchester’s identity become more complex and fragmented. .

In addition to excitement, the venue’s opening was also met with skepticism from some local residents who, Herrmann said, believe the money should have been divided among numerous cultural projects in the area. Local reactions to Aviva’s sponsorship were also “absolutely negative”, he added, even though pragmatic attitudes to private investment have been “a big part of Manchester’s story” since the 1980s.

Leading up to opening next week, Aviva Studios’ success is still up in the air, Spinoza said. If it can indeed provide transformative cultural experiences, he said, “people might come to believe it’s worth it.”