Friday 27 May 2011

Artist Amalia Pica's upcoming Chisenhale Gallery project

Amalia Pica: I am Tower of Hamlets, as I am in Tower of Hamlets, just like a lot of other people are

2 July 2011 – 29 June 2012
Launch event: 1 July 2011, 6.30-8.30pm at Chisenhale Gallery

Amalia Pica has been commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery to produce an offsite artwork to take place in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. I am Tower of Hamlets, as I am in Tower of Hamlets, just like a lot of other people are, (2011) is described by Pica as a nomadic sculpture which will leave her studio at the beginning of July 2011 and over the course of one year will be hosted by residents of Tower Hamlets.




I am Tower of Hamlets, as I am in Tower of Hamlets, just like a lot of other people are, stems from research made during Pica’s year-long residency at three Tower Hamlets’ secondary schools through Chisenhale Gallery’s A Sense of Place programme. Now in its third year, A Sense of Place, is Chisenhale Gallery's flagship exchange programme for three secondary schools in Tower Hamlets and artists with specific interests in collectivism, collaboration and direct engagement with social and cultural contexts. Chisenhale Gallery has received an investment from Deutsche Bank and Arts & Business to develop their education programme. The Arts & Business Investment Programme is funded by Arts Council England.

The project launch takes place as part of the CREATE11 festival (http://www.createlondon.org/). Now in its fourth year, the CREATE11 festival celebrates Europe's largest cultural quarter, the 2012 Olympic Host Boroughs.

Hand carved by Pica in pink granite, the sculpture is based on the Echevaria plant (the name is a mis-spelling of the surname of the 18th century Mexican botanical artist, Atanasio Echeverría y Godoy), a species native to South America but popular in domestic environments world wide due to its ability to thrive under any condition.

Residents of Tower Hamlets are invited to look after the sculpture for one week, then pass it on to the next participant. This exchange will happen every Saturday throughout the year. The sculpture’s travels will be recorded on a ‘lending card’, serving as a document of the meetings and exchanges between neighbours that made its journey possible. In June 2012, the sculpture will return to the gallery where it will be on display and an event will be held to commemorate its return.

Pica’s wide-ranging practice includes sculpture, drawing, photography, installation and film. I am Tower of Hamlets, as I am in Tower of Hamlets, just like a lot of other people are continues Pica’s interest in exploring the frameworks and cultural resonances of public sculpture and interventions into public space, while addressing ideas of collective memory through the precise materiality of the sculptures she produces. The work addresses the conventions of participatory art practice and the immediacy of individual visual perception grounded within an intimate encounter with the artwork.

On 1st July 2011, 6.30-8.30pm Chisenhale Gallery will host a launch event at the gallery prior to the sculpture’s travels around the borough, where the sculpture will be on display and Tower Hamlets residents will be able to sign up to participate in the project.

To host the sculpture please contact mailto:mail@chisenhale.org.uk


Biography:
Amalia Pica was born in Neuquén, Argentina in 1978, and lives and works in London. She was a resident artist at the Rijsakademie in Amsterdam in 2004 and 2005. Group exhibitions include Hayward Gallery, London (2010); Kunsthalle Basel (2008); Encuentro Regional de Arte, Montevideo (2007); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2007); Platform Garanti, Istanbul (2006) and the Liverpool Biennial (2006). Solo exhibitions include C-sale at Malmo Konsthall, Sweden (2010); Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam (2010); Marc Foxx Gallery, New York (2010); and Artis Den Bosch (2008). Pica is also one of the participating artists in the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale 2011 and currently has a solo show at the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

Thursday 26 May 2011

“Eff Off Hef!”: Feminists fight the reopening of London Playboy Club

Feminist campaigners are to stage protests at the opening of a new Playboy Club in London ’s Mayfair on 26th May and 4th June. 26th May is the Playboy Club’s press night. Campaigners will be present outside from 8.30pm. Playboy Club is situated on 14 Old Park Lane, Mayfair, London. W1K 1ND. 4th June is the official opening night of Playboy Club. The protest Facebook event is here.



The event is convened by OBJECT, the human rights organisation which campaigns against the sexual objectification of women, and UK Feminista, the national network of activists campaigning for equality between women and men. Picketers will greet Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, who is flying over from Los Angeles for the launch, with calls to, “Eff Off, Hef!”

The new club comes 30 years after its predecessor establishment, which was also based in Mayfair , closed after a police raid for suspected gambling irregularities (5). Playboy clubs are just one of a myriad of products licensed by Playboy Enterprises, an international pornography corporation whose outputs include a mix of pornographic films, websites, TV programming and children’s stationary.

Kat Banyard, Director of UK Feminista says:
When it comes to today’s pornography industry, all roads lead back to Playboy. It was Hugh Hefner who laid the political and cultural groundwork for the brutal, violently misogynistic pornography that now floods society. But sadly for Hefner, you can’t trademark sexism, and Playboy’s retro brand of ‘gentleman’s porn’ can no longer compete with the extreme degradation of modern internet pornography. Hence we see this endless diversification into nightclubs, video games, clothing and even children’s stationary.

But whatever product Playboy stamps its logo on, the basic brand concept is the same: woman reduced to sex object for man’s sexual satisfaction - and Playboy’s financial gain. Naturally Playboy Club London embodies this brand, offering champagne and sexism. So Eff off, Hef. And take your club with you.

Anna van Heeswijk, Campaigns Manager of OBJECT, says:
Far from a symbol of sophistication and class, the opening of a new Playboy club in London signifies a worrying step backwards in the quest for equality between the sexes. It entrenches the legitimacy of a porn empire which makes its fortune out of degrading women as fluffy animals who exist as sexual playthings for wealthy men. It opens the floodgates ever wider to the pornification of our popular culture. And it serves to embed further a porn emblem which insidiously grooms girls into accepting and embracing sex object culture by marketing its brand to children through playboy pencil cases and bed covers.

It is time to cut through the crap of the Playboy PR machine. Sexualising and objectifying women as bunny rabbits is not sexy and it is not empowering. It is sexist, and everyone knows it. This is why hundreds of women and men across the country are signing up to the OBJECT and UK Feminista campaign to object to the opening of the new Playboy club. Our message is clear - ‘Eff off Hef and stop degrading women!

For further details and interview requests please contact Anna van Heeswijk on 07783 887 154 / anna@object.org.uk  or Kat Banyard on 07775 855037 / kat@ukfeminista.org.uk
Visit Object here and UK Feminista here.

Wednesday 18 May 2011

From one brilliant woman to another

On 26th May Jude Kelly, director of the Southbank Centre, will be giving the The Mary Neal Lecture at the English Folk Song and Dance Society at Cecil Sharp House in Camden. Mary Neal was a reformer, suffragette and radical arts practitioner. A great spirit behind the early 20th century folk dance and song revival, Mary set up The Espérance Club in Somerstown teaching young working girls and children folk dance, among other things. In this annual lecture, Jude will be celebrating Mary’s pioneering social educational practices and the impact they’ve had on society. You can find out more by clicking here. The event is at 7pm for a 7.30pm start.

Thursday 5 May 2011

Women Make Sculpture

Christie Brown, Lost and Found

The Pangolin Gallery in London (Kings Place, 90 York Way, N1 9AG) is launching Women Make Sculpture, which will run from 19th May until 18th June.


Despite the huge success of a handful of sculptors such as Barbara Hepworth, Elisabeth Frink and Louise Bourgeois, women are still under-represented in major art shows, galleries and museums and under-valued on the art sales market. The Royal Academy’s current exhibition Modern British Sculpture which has received so much criticism for leaving out established male sculptors such as Antony Gormley (ha!) and Anish Kapoor. But what about the women? Is such a meagre selection really representative of the current state of British sculpture? Pangolin London thinks not.

Coinciding with the centenary year of International Women’s Day, Pangolin London will celebrate female achievement in sculpture with the exhibition Women Make Sculpture, an all female show highlighting the diversity and creativity of women sculptors today. The exhibition will bring into the spotlight a number of established female artists including Sarah Lucas, Dorothy Cross, Ann Christopher and Alison Wilding as well as emerging names such as Polly Morgan, Abigail Fallis, Rose Gibbs and Briony Marshall.

Women Make Sculpture provides an opportunity to focus on a selection of sculpture inspired by topical issues that concern women today such as war, mental health, sex, childbirth and science. Director of Pangolin London, Polly Bielecka, notes: “The exhibition is not intended to tackle gender superiority; rather it hopes to question whether female artists bring something different to contemporary British sculpture.”

The exhibition will include an eclectic mix of work in a variety of media ranging from Almuth Tebbenhoff’s powerful yet intricate steel wall pieces to Polly Morgan’s taxidermy constructions, and from Deborah van der Beek’s emotive horse head Collateral made from the detritus of war to Rose Gibbs’ controversial Mountain of figures and penises violently expelling bodily fluids.

Pangolin London is well-placed to do a survey show of this kind thanks to its unique affiliation with Europe’s largest sculpture foundry Pangolin Editions and its remit to promote sculpture in all its forms. Pangolin London will also host a panel discussion to coincide with the exhibition on Monday 23rd May at Kings Place. This will include both artists exhibiting in the show and guest speakers to encourage a lively debate.

To book tickets please click here.
A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.
The Pangolin Gallery is open Tues - Saturday 10am-6pm




This text is taken from the Pangolin's press release.

Tuesday 3 May 2011

What is society's birth rite?

On 9th and 11th May the art collective Enemies of Good Art will be participating in the Birth Rites Symposia.

The Birth Rites Collection is holding two days of symposia to explore the visual representations of childbirth. A range of academics, artists and curator will discuss the social, political and artistic implications of work
around the subject of childbirth in contemporary art. There will be discussion on the following: sexuality and childbirth; changing art practice post childbirth; Taboos and censorship around the representations of childbirth; the implications a lack of the representation of childbirth has on the status of women within society; and the male perspective on childbirth.

Speakers include Lisa Baraitser, Jemima Brown, Matt Collier, Dominique Heyse-Moore, Helen Knowles, Martina Mullaney, Liv Pennington, Imogen Tyler, Eti Wade, Johnathan Waller and Hermione Wiltshire.

The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester - 9th May 2011, 10am
The Whitechapel Gallery, London - 11th May 2011, 11am

Find out more and get your tickets here.

Sunday 1 May 2011

Paradoxical Undressing by Kristin Hersh

Kristin Hersh’s memoir is a spiky scrawl of memory, music, the muse and amusement.

Kristin Hersh is my heartbreak singer. Her solo album Hips and Makers soundtracked my teen weekends with its echoey beauty and wiry, soaring sound. Hersh’s solo work, as well as her output with her band Throwing Muses, established her decades ago as one of the handful of true genius songwriters, composers and performers working today. That reputation is stronger than ever now.

Paradoxical Undressing is the non-fiction telling of how Hersh became Hersh. With snappy cleverness and terse wit we come to know of her talent, her smarts and her clout as well as her internal creative struggles. It is, incidentally, a beautifully presented book featuring artwork created by Shinro Ohtake on the cover.

Factually, it reveals much about Hersh that fills the reader with awe. She was a child prodigy who formed Throwing Muses in 1981 when she was fourteen. They were an instant success, but this did not distract Hersh from starting university when she was fifteen. The intensity which came out in the Muses’ work was a direct result of their frontwoman’s intense talent. Her countless ideas, plans and inspirations could not all be sublimated in creativity in good time and eventually took their toll. She attempted suicide at eighteen and was ultimately diagnosed as bipolar.

Paradoxical Undressing’s unflinching and unsentimental look at mental illness succeeds because it is narrated by a fundamentally sound, frank, funny individual whose interpretations we trust. We are even frequently delighted by them. This is Hersh on the joys of canine prescience: “Zoe was never wrong. She could catch a Frisbee ten feet in the air and catch a problem ten minutes before it happened. She’d refuse to get in a car headed for the vet’s office, but she’d leap joyfully into one that was going to the beach. She loved children and cats and hated snotty rich people.”

Don’t we all? With its mix of darkness and quirky light, Paradoxical Undressing is the perfect book for a Hersh fan. In many ways it’s exactly what one would expect: witty, jaggedly perceptive, suffused with dense creativity and sensitivity. The book contains some of the most perceptive and interesting writing on composition I’ve ever read:

Play colours, I think to myself, as the swishing voices conspire against me. This song doesn’t sound like colours, it sounds like…machines. …There are notes in there, though. I find them and play them, reduce the industrial noise I hear to a pathetic plunking. That melody needs a bed and chords come only through trial and error. So when a sound the guitar makes matches the sound that’s filling the Bullet, I keep that chord and move on to the next one. It gets easier each time, as one chord will set up the next, words in a sentence, then voices in a paragraph.

Voices playing counter to the guitar parts then form themselves into a kind of phonetic melody. These syllables pile themselves up into words and say things that are hard to grasp, hard to control, and I plug my ears to their meaning. I know I’ve lived the stories they tell, but I never wanted to tell them; the songs do. I’m just playing along.

…If I try to jump into the song and write it myself, sorta hurry it along, my lyrics’ll stick out like ugly relatives. You can tell it’s me talking because suddenly the song isn’t beautiful any more – it just makes sense. Or worse, it’s clever.

The real song waits patiently for me to shut up and then picks up where it left off: time-tripping, speaking in math, bodies and dreams, landscapes, passed notes, pages from this diary, conversations, memories, newspapers and unmailed letters that crawled back out of the garbage – sometimes sweet, sometimes angry, sometimes funny, but always twisted up and painted in extravagantly ugly technicolour: well-rehearsed Tourette’s.

It’s not like I’ve embraced the songwriting process. I haven’t even accepted it; it’s too creepy. There’s an electrical component, for example – the lightning rod thing. I get all flitchy and my hair stands on end, like a seizure. With a heightened awareness of …meaning, for lack of a better word, that feels like possession. Whatever is important at that moment will jump up into the air and grab my electrified brain.

I have never witnessed an artist explaining themselves with such thrilling pithiness, ardour and (at the same time) mystery, and reading passages like these is exhilarating. There is also an ever-present wit which twangs laconically from Charlie Brown deadpan to wild mischief, an indie-rock imp laughing at the unnoticed absurdities of life: “According to Massachusetts law, because we’re too young to drink, we aren’t allowed anywhere in the building during business hours except the dressing room (where all the free beer is) or on the stage (where the rest of the free beer is).”

Given the poise of the prose it’s amazing that much of the material in Paradoxical Undressing is from Hersh’s teenaged journals. Throughout, there is a dry humour and a pleasing circumspection about fame that frankly eludes many musicians of much more advanced years: “My band is very suspicious of its fans. We could stand to buy a little of our own hype. When people come to our shows, it confuses us; we can’t imagine what they’re doing there. We like Throwing Muses ‘cause we are Throwing Muses. But why do they keep showing up?”

Hersh’s comic timing and ability to keep the notes of a joke (and a song) going do make me think that should the musical muse every dry up, she could write straight up satirical TV comedy and not miss a beat. However, behind the jokes, wisecracks and observations, the vignettes about life on the road, the freaks and freakouts and the smart character portraits, is a sense of brooding heaviness. There is little empty air to breathe in the book. That which there is, is full of unwritten music, dry ice from gigs, cigarette smoke and dark anxiety. The atmosphere of the book is thick with fears, intimations, snags and songs. One has the impression of the writer scribbling her sentences, the writing too small and cramped, pressed hard into the paper, holding the pen in a strangling grip.

Ultimately the value of Paradoxical Undressing is that it does not represent Hersh as a girl-gone-wild, a lost girl, a crazy girl, a girl who got lucky or got saved or got inspired or any other belittling stereotype. Instead she comes across, with admirable frankness, as what she is: a woman of talent, intelligence, strength, complexity, standing and drive. This is a book about the power of creativity and the joy of music, the buzz of performance, the thrill of songwriting, the bliss of singing, the fun of touring and the absurdity of band life. Along the way there are fellow travellers, some creepy, some quirky, but above all there is a purity of purpose and a powerful sense of Hersh’s vocation – and her genius.  

Paradoxical Undressing is published by Atlantic Books.


NOTE: Hersh is a co-founder of the non-profit Coalition of Artists and Stake Holders (http://www.cash-music.org/) who record and release music without a record company. Her current work is entirely listener-funded and is available free of charge and free to be shared via the Creative Commons license.

During 2011 Kristin Hersh is making available a series of four session recordings in which Throwing Muses performs songs inspired by Paradoxical Undressing. These collections will be available for download via her web site, http://www.kristinhersh.com/seasonsessions, and will be released in four special edition CDs, The Season Sessions – Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer.


The Women's Liberation Music Archive launches

An exciting new online resource launches today: the Women’s Liberation Movement Music Archive.

This project documents the bands, musicians and musical projects that were part of, or influenced by, the great burgeoning of cultural creativity generated by the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) of the 1970s and 80s.

During this era, women’s music, film and theatre groups, visual art, literature, performance art, street theatre and other activities proliferated, fusing artistic activities with politics to develop and express feminist ideas. Feminist bands and musicians were not solely about providing great entertainment but embodied a world-changing commitment to putting politics into practice and advancing women’s rights. Challenging sexism and stereotyped gender roles, their lyrics and style reflected the values of the WLM. They were a vital and integral part of the movement, yet are often omitted from or marginalised by the media and historical accounts. Many operated outside the commercial mainstream or alternative circuits – or indeed were oppositional to them – and are not widely known about. Most were self-funded, grassroots groups who worked on a shoestring and many were unable to create lasting material.

Concerned that this part of women’s history is at risk of being lost, Archive Co-ordinators Dr Deborah Withers and Frankie Green believe the achievements of these music-makers should be mapped and celebrated. This work-in-progress collection comprises testimonies and interviews, discographies, gigographies and memorabilia including photographs, videos, recordings, flyers, press clippings and posters, plus links to ongoing women’s music-making and feminist activism. The project is an independent, voluntary and (as yet) unfunded venture. Funding possibilities and a safe eventual home for the physical archive are being investigated.

All women who were involved in women’s music – as solo artists, in bands, as DJs, MCs, in distribution networks, recording studios, photographers, journalists, events organisers, etc – are invited to contact and contribute to the project.

FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT wlmmusicarchive@gmail.com


This text is taken from the wlma press release.