Everything Must Go is a playful new work by the artist group Foreign Investment. This commissioned project for Chinese Arts Centre, takes a highly engaged approach to connect the Centre and the public. Everything Must Go offers a unique experience for visitors to actively involve themselves as suppliers, producers and investors throughout the different stages of the exhibition. In the first instance, members of the public are invited to participate by donating unwanted consumer objects for an 'upgrade'. Then a group of volunteer recruited locally will work with the artists to gold-gild the objects. The finally upgraded product will be available for public to purchase in the art sale at the end of the exhibition.

Foreign Investment seek to create situations where artists and participants come together to question the value of things in unexpected ways. Here they will use the gallery as a depot, workshop and showroom simultaneously. Hundreds of outmoded, redundant and discarded (or neglected) consumer objects donated by local retailers, neighbours and the people of Manchester will be sorted. Objects 'made in China' will then be given a new lease of life and turned into gold.

Foreign Investment is an international artist group based and founded in the UK with a fluctuating membership from a wide range of backgrounds. Their projects seek to question and challenge established routes of commerce and exchange by disrupting them with generosity. They have used gold in different projects in (Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, London and Oslo) – invariably using the gilding process to respond to specific geographical and cultural contexts.

Everything Must Go for Chinese Arts Centre, aims to create social encounters through the magical medium of gold and to give discarded and obsolete objects another lease of life through fabricating desirable 'objets d'arts' – thus bringing awareness of notions of value, not only to the object itself, but to the notion of labour and 'surplus value' (Marx). With this project Foreign Investment wish to offer tangible understandings and appreciations of both the origins of a product and the multitude of products we consume in our daily lives.

There will be a number of events for this project including a gilding demonstration on 20 August where members of the public will be able to see the gilding. The event will close with 2 events a sale of the final gold objects on 16 September and an exchange day on 17 September.