Manchester Pride is fast-approaching and to celebrate the city’s LGBTQIA+ community an audio visual exhibition, known as Proud, is taking to the shopping streets. Commissioned by Manchester Business Improvement District (BID) and curated by Heard Storytelling, visitors will be able to listen to the true spoken stories of 20 LGBTQIA+ people who live or work in the city.
The exhibition is free to access and all of the spoken stories will be accompanied by beautiful large-scale portraits of the storytellers, forming a trail of ‘Living Portraits’ through the city centre. All of the 20 true spoken stories will be accessed via scanning a QR code on listeners’ mobile phones located next to the storyteller’s portrait, as well as being hosted online here for those unable to visit the trail in person.
From the streets of Jamaica, stages of Manchester, dressing rooms of working men’s clubs and the nation’s TV screens, the audio recordings will take listeners on personal and candid journeys around the theme of ‘Proud’, with the importance of representation at their core. For instance, Darren takes us on a journey through difficult beginnings as a child on Moss Side, moments of triumph towards self-acceptance and living authentically in the place where he calls home, while Norman talks us through how coming out as bisexual at 72 changed the course of his life.
Recently ordained Priest at St James and Emmanuel, Augustine, recounts the moment when his searching for a space to be ‘all of who he is’ comes to an end, the moment when ‘otherness becomes brotherness’ and how he is creating that loving space for all of the ‘beautiful parts of humanity’. And Vil who as a child threw open a dressing up box and took delight in dressing up in princess gowns, with complete freedom of expression finds as her body begins to change with puberty, her dressing up box is replaced with a box society wants to put her in.
The Proud exhibition runs from August 20 – September 2 and will be hosted in the windows of shops, restaurants and businesses across the city centre including Selfridges, Harvey Nichols, Manchester Arndale, Royal Exchange building on Exchange Street and Kala and Kuoni on King Street.