- Every fucking day, in the words of the unofficial Brummie Laureate, 'Big' Brendan. Birmingham has been branded as a shopping mecca and, not wanting to buck current trends, we at Friction decided to embrace the capitalist nightmare that is the City Centre and become retailers. Sort of.
We set up the Curio City Shop, in Five Ways Shopping Centre at the end of 2005, not as grand as it sounds, the centre is a horrible sixties concrete nightmare, with only about half a dozen businesses still operating out of around 25. Five Ways itself is a bit odd, a border area, with the neighbouring low-income estates of Five Ways, Leebank and Ladywood, next to the Broad Street 'Cultural Zone' and the office blocks around Five Ways, posher neighbourhoods in Edgbaston and spitting distance from the coty centre itself.
So, why a shop? Well, we were looking for an outlet for art, that wasn't a gallery, as we wanted to get new audiences for ours and other artists work. Everyone (bar the odd agoraphobic) uses shops and is comfortable going in and out of them, few people are comfortable in an art gallery (I know I'm not and I'm an artist!), but we're all used to getting the things we want from a shop. Why not a shop that sells nothing, except the opportunity to view and engage with art? Why not indeed, and so the shop was born....
