as it is was a season of contemporary art situated inside Ikon Gallery and off-site, concerned with the nature of urban space -the ìsoftî city and its infrastructures – ‘as it is’ for its inhabitants. It involved a diverse range of work from a new lottery game to a portable karaoke project, from cooking on a canal boat to comic books in taxi cabs. Video, photography, installation, painting, sound and performance were commissioned by Ikon and many of the artists took the city of Birmingham as their inspiration.

Participating artists included Merry Alpern (USA), Guy Bar-Amotz (Israel), Margaret Barron (UK), Tim Brennan (UK), John Carson (UK), Nathan Coley (UK), Jeffrey Dennis (UK), Kane Do (Vietnam), Fischli and Weiss (Switzerland), Kenneth Goldsmith (USA), Joanna Griffin (UK), Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stones (UK), Pierre Huyghe (France), Tadashi Kawamata (Japan), Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen (Scotland/The Netherlands), Colin Pearce (UK), Paul Noble (UK). Navin Rawanchaikul (Thailand), Scanner (UK), George Shaw (UK), Shimabuku (Japan), Angel Vergara (Belgium), Luca Vitone (Italy) and Richard Wentworth (UK).