"After the success of Spoilt Rotten, 2005 and Surface, 2006, Oriel Davies is delighted to announce ME v U, a new exhibition curated by our Young Curators as part of a three year programme supported by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

The project gives young people aged between 15 and 24 the opportunity to take part in all aspects of staging an exhibition and to make their impact upon contemporary art in Wales.

This year's project has seen 9 young people from Powys work towards curating an exhibition with works from Wolverhampton Art Gallery's permanent collection.

Working as a team the Young Curators have undertaken all aspects of the exhibition's development; selecting works, negotiating loans, gathering interpretation material, writing press releases and designing the catalogue and related material.

Having spent time looking at the works available, 'conflict' arose as an overriding theme that the curators were interested in working with and it was not long before ME v U became the show's defining title.

Wanting to focus upon the 'tensions and struggles in our society', the exhibition comprises a range of works that deal with the wide boundaries of what constitutes conflict in the 20th and 21st Century.

They write:

ME v U is an exhibition that everyone can relate to. Through personal argument, a political debate, cultural difference, family struggles, gang warfare, religious disagreement, terrorist activity, opposing opinions, domestic crime, internal struggles, we all consciously and unconsciously face conflicts of differing scales on a daily basis.

As well as selecting work from Wolverhampton Art Gallery's collection the Young Curators have commissioned new work by Cardiff based artist, Rabab Ghazoul.

Ghazoul's wall-based text pieces, situated throughout the exhibition, lay further interpretation and create a dialogue with the work in the show. Her response has arisen from conversations with the Young Curators about what conflict is and means to them today.

ME v U has given the Young Curators the opportunity to curate a wide range of works of significant historical importance, by artists such as Andy Warhol, Jock McFadyen and Joe Tilson.

The exhibition provides the opportunity to look at these works in a reflective context, and includes work associated with the conflicts of Northern Ireland, Vietnam and Afghanistan alongside more domestic and societal issues of poverty, homelessness and alcohol abuse.

At the same time Me v U considers how present and future generations might hope to better society by taking stock of the mistakes and actions of the past.

The Young Curators invite you to challenge them..."

Article by Matthew Richardson