]performance s p a c e [
Unit 6 Hamlet Industrial Estate,
White Post Lane,
London E9 5EN

Thursday 7 April 2011, from 6.30pm

Free

To coincide with First Thursdays, tonight both Wimbledon College of Art and associate artists will present work at the excellent ]performance s p a c e [.

Come along tonight to watch and discuss performance, the event's free entry and open to all - you're invited to BYO food and thoughts.

Tonight, ]performance s p a c e [ Artists featured will be Bean, Stephanie Hurst, Ryan Jordan, Martin Lufty, Benjamin Sebastian and Kiki Taira. They will be joined by the following Wimbledon College of Art students: Abigail Duffty, Cheng Zhi Miao, Eleni Savvidou, Filipa Guimaraes, Katherine Graham, Madeleine Botet de Lacaze, Tomoko Takahashi, Yu Wang and Yueer Zhang.

More details at http://www.performancespace.org/

More from us on past events at ]performancespace[ at http://freeartlondon.wordpress.com/?s=%5Dperformancespace%5B

Lo & Behold
2B Swanfield Street
London E2 7DS

Friday 8 – Sunday 24 April 2011
Preview: Thursday 7 April 2011, 6-9pm
Screenings of Ingham Brooke’s film Moroloja at 7 and 8pm

Free

On The Great Divide brings four young interdisciplinary artists together for an exhibition that gravitates around displaced histories and ruin.

The exhibition features works by Alexander Ingham Brooke, Alex Sprogis, Isobel Mei Taylor, and Kyle Zeto. These pieces reflect a concern with cultural legacies and their temporal displacement, presenting an alluring past to counterbalance the looming hydra of digital technology and its parallels with Baudrillard’s end of history and switch-centre theories. This exhibition does not lament the approach of hybrid artistic paradigms but explores through those methods how our past, viewed through this new hallucinatory prism, erupts on the present.

Individually, the artists works question ruin and ritual, and as a whole, form a non-linear narrative on memory, legacy and ruin. Ingham Brooke’s film Moroloja explores a history of funeral documentation in Martano, a town in Southern Italy where Ancient Greek death rites are still performed by its residents.

From a distant lament to a current one, Sprogis’ Stratford Façade is a critical response to the 2012 Olympic development and ceremony, dealing with the relationship between the physical and visual experiences of the architectural intervention in Stratford, East London. Conversely, Taylor’s works document fictionally constructed monuments and examine the traces of human history and imagination left behind in structures that point to an alternative existence.

Zeto’s photographs and masks relate to old British folklores and customs that now live as re-enactments or spectacle removed from their original pre-Christian belief system. This folk history nevertheless survives and resurfaces, perhaps responding to our crisis of Post-Modernism or an instinctual nostalgia for the past, a feeling that actually might not be so natural.

More info via http://www.loandbeholdlondon.co.uk/

Hales Gallery
7 Bethnal Green Road
London E1 6LA

Friday 8 April – 14 May 2011
Preview: Thursday 7 April, 6-9pm

Free

This show of work from London based Sculptor Tom Price features five works, all figures of similar proportion and scale placed upon salvaged, revitalised and adapted plinths.

Tom Price, New Drape (Shakespeare Road), 2011

For Angell Town, Price has imbued each figure with a seemingly plausible and believable persona, however, they are all fictional hybrid identities. Each work is invented and constructed with the help of people he has observed on the street or from magazine images, and from looking at neoclassical and classical sculpture. All of the figures are male, black and clothed in simple contemporary attire. Price has also vested them with the ‘accessories of modernity’; the telltale bulge of a mobile phone tucked into a pocket, the branded training shoes and a corporate name badge pinned to a jacket. The facial expressions are also carefully crafted, with all five men looking as if they are in a state of contemplation.

Tom Price, Sportswear (Achilles Street), 2011

Tom Price, New Drape (Shakespeare Road), 2011

Price’s figures have their origins rooted in Classicism and more recently Neoclassicism, but he subverts the idealised bodies of Greek and Roman sculpture, instead presenting us with modern archetypal figures. The effect challenges the viewer to examine both the works’ symbolic place as part of a western culture and the role of the black male in the history of sculpture.

Tom Price, Midnight Temple (Figure 1, Astoria Walk), 2011

Angell Town encourages the viewer to develop a mental construct of these characters, of where they live and what they do. Each figure is given a geographic identity based in the areas of London where Price has lived and worked for a considerable time. These areas are not only the places that artists often choose for studios but are also the historic bases for London’s immigrant community: Hackney, Brixton, Dalston, Deptford. The titles suggest a romanticised view of the city and its inhabitants, akin to the characterisation and locale portrayed in a Charles Dickens novel. Often, Price will use a street name with historic gravitas or mythic qualities, such as Achilles Street, making the ordinary sound heroic and the fabled appear normal.

Price’s mother is White British and his father Black Jamaican. This has put him in an interesting position in relation to the traditions of western sculpture, which he manipulates, performing a volte-face from the stance taken by many modernists influenced by tribal sculpture. In this way, his sculpture manages to be both traditional in materiality and progressive in its cultural and conceptual significance.

More details at http://www.halesgallery.com/exhibitions/_36/

More about the artist: http://tompricestudio.com/

ICA
The Mall,
London SW1Y 5AH

Friday 8 April 2011, from 6.30pm

Free, booking required

Tomorrow, the ICA’s Artist Film Club features David Blandy’s latest work Child of the Atom.

Inspired by his grandfather’s belief that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima saved his life when he was a POW held by the Japanese, Child of the Atom revolves around footage of Blandy and his daughter visiting Hiroshima for the first time together.

Attempting to literally and symbolically come to terms with their personal connection to the bombing of the city, Blandy intersperses scenes of modern Hiroshima with flashback sequences of apocalyptic anime, featuring the film’s eponymous character who must decide if he is hero or villain.

Throughout his practice, David Blandy undertakes investigations into the cultural forces that construct his identity, ranging from his love of hip hop and soul, to computer games and manga.

After the screening, David Blandy will discuss making the work, memory, and family legends in relation to historical traumas, with collaborating Mango artist and Japanese expat Inko, and Anne Piper, a novelist and playwright, who has been actively protesting against nuclear weapons for over 50 years in addition to being Blandy’s grandmother.

More details at http://www.ica.org.uk/28689/Film/Artists-Film-Club-David-Blandy.html

More about Child of the Atom from last year’s exhibition at Seventeen Gallery: http://freeartlondon.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/david-blandy-is-a-child-of-the-atom/

MOT INTERNATIONAL
Unit 54, Regents Studios,
8 Andrews Rd,
London E8 4QN

Saturday 9 April – 21 May, 2011
Preview: Friday 8 April 2011, 6-9pm

Free

Having embarked on a year long project to produce a film based on Rory Macbeth’s The Wanderer, itself a mistranslation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, for this show Laure Prouvost has created an ambitious new installation which grounds itself in a form of prologue to the film.

Through a cacophony of sound, image and objects, Prouvost creates the surreal narrative of Jenny as she seeks Gregor, in a world of broken mirrors, misunderstandings and confusion in which the audience is both a participant and foil to Jenny’s quest, sending her drunk and spinning out of control. The only things holding the narrative together are a series of story-boards, drawing a line between the separate elements.

Prouvost is increasingly developing work that spills out of the frame of her previous medium of film. Her installations aim to create a portal to cinematic environments, breaking free of their frames, becoming a celebration of imperfection.

More information via http://www.motinternational.com/exhibitions-current.html

Southbank Centre, The Clore Ballroom
Belvedere Road
London SE1 8XX

8 April 2011, from 5.30pm

Free

Tomorrow, this free event for Ether festival is curated by DJ and broadcaster Nick Luscombe (BBC Radio 3 Late Junction/Resonance FM Flomotion), featuring music from The Simonsound and others.

The Simonsound are intergalactic synthesiser duo Simon James and Matt Ford (aka DJ Format), whose debut album Reverse Engineering channels the pioneering electronics and mood music of the 60′s, using analogue synthesisers, FX and tape machines. They are joined on stage by the seductive Debbie Clare (vocals), the dynamic and captivating Laura J Martin (vocals, flute, mandolin) and a spaced-out montage of 1950s and 1960s science, science fiction, space exploration and psychedelic projections.

Continuing the sci-fi theme, inspired by 2001 – A Space Odyssey, Nick Luscombe will also DJ a blend of futuristic electronic dancefloor sounds across the evening.

More details at http://ticketing.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/music/gigs-contemporary/tickets/nick-luscombe-presents-the-simonsound-57305 and http://ether.southbankcentre.co.uk/5/events/nick-luscombe-presents-the-simonsound-3/

Flat Time House,
210 Bellenden Road,
London SE15 4BW

Friday 8 April – Sunday 15 May 2011
Preview: Thursday 7 April 2011, 6-9pm

Free

This exhibition of new work made at Flat Time House looks at time, music, symbols and signs.

Bea McMahon, Ket, Production still, 2011

In Cats (HD video, colour, sound) and Mats (wool, whiskers, walnuts) Bea McMahon’s intention is the collapsing together of two types of time. The work is made up of things that are like other things: walnuts looking like the brain, for instance, or a mounted stone lion taking the form of a cat on a mat. A fold in time is temporarily created by the collision of things and beliefs that are out of time with each other; they are the myth and meter of two different eras.

Bea McMahon, Production still, 2011

In medieval music, Complete Time sounded 3 beats in the whole and was notated by an O. Our contemporary hip-hop soundtrack of 4 beats in the whole was known as ‘incomplete time’ – still notated today by an incomplete circle like a letter C or an opening bracket (. The notational space shifted from the medieval ratio-based measure to the current fraction-based one.

Bea McMahon, Bra, Production still, 2011

By leveling the fundamental difference between a ratio and a fraction a new hierarchy twists into existence that has the odd effect of raising the bar (or unit of musical time measure) above the interrelationship between the notes. The 3/4 time signature now embodies the role and presence of Complete Time’s measure – hiding it within three quarters of its former whole.

In McMahon’s film, two cats play out these time signatures, walking along wooden boards. The cat with a limp has the meter of 3/4 or Complete Time, the cat without a limp keeps 4/4, ‘incomplete time’. In medieval mythology the absent beat of the limper sounded in another world. The work deals in the meaning of things and the agency of images and signs.

More details via http://www.flattimeho.org.uk/project/52/

Shoreditch Town Hall
Basement Gallery,
380 Old Street,
London EC1V 9LT

Thursday 7 – Saturday 9 April 2011

Free

This group show from Clare Lewis, Francesca Garlake and Juliet Miller explores the shifting balances between analysis and empathy, the viewer and the object, the limits of our subjectivity and our desire to escape the bounds of our materiality, the fragilities upon which we anchor our sense of existence. Present consciousness exists only as an awareness of what is already past.

Clare Lewis, Suspension body trousers

Confronting essentially artifical boundaries, the artists’ practices share an approach of humility, respectful of the only certainty: that of constant transition within uncertain realities.

More details at http://76.12.250.57/events/detail.php?id=83

David Roberts Art Foundation
111 Great Titchfield St,
London W1W 6RY

Thursday 7 April – 11 June 2011

Free

Studies for an Exhibition brings together practices that explore the possibilities of immateriality and the temporal nature of an art object. The question of time and accumulation is paramount to an exhibition that considers a recycling of our current reality as the means to generate transitory new forms.

Karin Sander ‘Mailed Painting Nr. 60, New York – Stuttgart – Berlin – St. Gallen – Berlin – Düsseldorf – Berlin – London, 2010

The exhibition features works and new commissions by Elena Bajo, Emma Bjornesparr, Julia Rometti and Victor Costales, Gustav Metzger, Roman Opalka, Karin Sander and Niele Toroni.

More details at http://www.davidrobertsartfoundation.com/exhibitions/_41/

ICA
The Mall,
London SW1Y 5AH

Wednesday 6 April 2011, from 8pm

Free

Since its beginning in 2010, Ryan Gander’s Night School programme, held monthly at his studio in East London, has sought to give speakers an informal, salonesque platform to present whatever they like – new ideas, old ideas, bad ideas or thoughts in progress. Tomorrow, the ICA will host the Night School as a free event, open to all.

Photo: John Newton

More details at http://www.ica.org.uk/?lid=28664