Statuesque: Atlas shoulders the weight of the world at Portmeirion, one of the featured places in the book. Photograph: Travis Elborough
On the outskirts of Mexico City, we’re told, are “the last vestiges of a gigantic and ancient system of canals, terracotta aqueducts and tens of thousands of man-made islands… called chinampas”, one of which has become known as the Island of Dolls.
This “terrifying attraction” was formerly home to a lone hermit, Don Julian Santana Barrera, who one day discovered the body of a young girl drowned in the canal.
The next day, the recluse found a doll washed up on the shore, which he believed must have belonged to the girl, so he attached it to a tree in her memory.
When another doll arrived, the “one-off tribute [turned] into an obsession and before long Don Julian was fishing about in the canal and scouring local rubbish dumps for more dolls to place in trees and to furnish his makeshift abode”.
The loner died in 2001, reputedly drowning in the same part of the canal as the girl, and the place has since grown into a gallery of hanging dolls, with visitors travelling to add to the collection. Oddly, “the life cycles of these anthropomorphic creations” are “alarmingly similar to our own”. It’s a curious and delightfully eerie tale.
Stoke Newington author Travis Elborough’s Atlas of Improbable Places is a collection of short essays describing some of the strangest and most historically-obscure locations across the globe. Split into six sections – Dream Creations, Deserted Destinations, Architectural Oddities, Floating Worlds, Otherworldly Spaces and Subterranean Realms – the peculiarities contained in this somewhat bizarre book are manifold.
Author Travis Elborough
From the aforementioned Isle of Dolls to a squatter metropolis in California, Ireland’s bloody and haunted Leap Hall, and media tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s never-completed mansion, there’s plenty of interest to explore.
Among the highlights is a fascinating account of the formation of a subterranean network of tunnels in the Canadian city of Moose Jaw, where a community of Chinese workers – who arrived to work on the Canadian Pacific Railway – were driven underground as scapegoats when the country slipped into recession.
And then there’s Wrangel Island, on which herds of woolly mammoths thrived while their kin were elsewhere dying out.
Elborough seems particularly intrigued, though, by the geographical remnants of the Soviet Union, and the articles resulting from this are invariably captivating.
He writes of a once closed Soviet city that could now “be taken for a vintage Soviet theme park”; of the Darvaza Crater, or Door to Hell, in Turkmenistan, where a team of Soviet geologists drilling for natural gas in 1971 “blundered and created a deep sinkhole oozing potentially poisonous methane vapours”, which they proceeded to set alight; and then also the acutely symbolic Hill of Crosses in Lithuania.
The release of Atlas of Improbable Places follows Elborough’s excellent A Walk in the Park, and it’s most certainly welcome. It’s informative and enthusiastic, scholarly and amusing. While it might seem tempting to pop this book in the loo and flick through it in short bursts, it’s best read in one or two long stints – not least because once started it’s nigh on impossible to put down.
Atlas of Improbable Places: A Journey to the World’s Most Unusual Corners is published by Aurum Press. ISBN: 978-1781315323. RRP: £20
Going ape: the Guerrilla Girls. Photograph: Andrew Hindraker. Courtesy of the Guerrilla Girls
Massively influential feminist art pioneers the Guerrilla Girls once stated that “the world of artists is great, but the art world sucks”.
This conviction has shaped their project since their formation in 1980s New York, with the group challenging those in control of major museums and galleries to present and champion more work made by women and by people of colour. Their art names and shames with statistics, graphs and appeals to equality, plastered on galleries, projected onto buildings and splashed across cities on advertising billboards.
This month a new exhibition from the group opens at the Whitechapel Gallery. I sat down with two members of the group, Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz (the members use the names of deceased female artists), to discuss the new show, their recent work and the current state of the art world.
Your new work which opens at the Whitechapel Gallery is in part a revisiting of the 1986 poster ‘It’s Even Worse in Europe’. Is representation in the art world still worse in Europe than in America?
Frida Kahlo (Guerrilla Girl): Let’s just say that it’s different in Europe. Visitors to the exhibition need to come and make up their mind about that. We wanted to gather some statistical information from the mouths of the museums themselves, and then show how these European museums present themselves.
Revisited for Whitechapel Gallery exhibition: the Guerrilla Girls’ 1986 poster ‘It’s Even Worse in Europe’. Courtesy of the Guerrilla Girls
On the difference between America and Europe, I was wondering if New York in the 1980s influenced the way the group started to make work?
Kathe Kollwitz (Guerrilla Girl): We are both founding members of the Guerrilla Girls, and what we saw in the beginning was that it was almost impossible for women or artists of colour to have their work shown in commercial galleries. There was a very vibrant alternative scene, which was fantastic, but there was so much other discrimination. If you look at a poster we made in 1985 poster that lists how many museums had shows by a woman, it was one at best. Usually it was nothing. We thought that was completely ridiculous. We knew so many great artists who were women, women-identified or people of colour, and it was total discrimination.
There were demonstrations where people would walk around with picket signs, but nobody cared. The art world wants to pretend that everything is perfect, that art is a meritocracy and that the institutions and the galleries know best. We knew that wasn’t the case, and we realised that there had to be a way to talk about this that would change people’s minds and get their attention. So we started blaming one institution after another. When our posters hit the streets in May 1985, all hell broke loose. The powers that be were really pissed off.
FK: We also noticed that whilst women and people of colour were making some advances in the larger world, they were not making them in the art world. Even though it always wants to think of itself as avant-garde and ahead of it all. It even took the form of theory, because gallery owners and curators would say that women artists and artists of colour just didn’t make work that’s good enough. What that revealed was that they had a very narrow view of history. They were still dealing with a history of the art of white men, not realising that you can’t tell the history of a culture without all the voices included in the story. It was embarrassing that the art world was that far behind.
Several of the institutions that you protested against early on have now shown or acquired the work of the Guerrilla Girls. Were you ever concerned that by including your work they’re trying to dodge some of the critique within it?
KK: Absolutely. When this first started happening about ten years ago it really was a moment of truth for us. We had to sit and talk about it and think about how we were being used by these institutions. Does getting our message out to big audiences mitigate the fact that we are definitely being used by them? Our goal from the beginning was to get our message out to as many people as possible, and so we realised that we had be in the museums as well. We still love the street best though, we started on the street and still do things there.
FK: And we’re back on the street here in Whitechapel!
KK: That’s our favourite place to be. But whenever a work appears in a museum we get tons of comments and emails from people saying that they didn’t know this stuff before. So the message we’re talking about, our institutional critique and attack on the system of art (which is more and more billionaire-controlled) really needs to be there.
FK: And it’s not as though we’ve accepted every one of these invitations. We have never accepted any form of censorship from an institution. There is always a moment of truth when we present the work to the institution and they gasp! That is an important moment in itself.
Do institutions ever try to explain themselves to you?
KK: Not really. If they’ve invited us they’ve opened themselves up. They’ve invited us to critique them, and they are well-meaning people. Many people working in institutions are trying to change them. Although lot of museums think they’re doing better than they really are. In our exhibition here at the Whitechapel we have one whole section asking whether US museum practices are polluting Europe. And the answer to that was pretty much a resounding yes!
FK: In the US most of our museums are private with non-profit status, but they’re still run by art collectors. That tendency to let galleries and museums be manipulated by wealthy collectors starts in the United States. And of course, in some parts of the world, the only places you can go and see contemporary art is in an institution wholly owned, run and controlled by oligarchs.
To what extent is humour an integral part of what the Guerrilla Girls do?
KK: I think it’s a really important part. From the beginning we never wanted to do political art that says ‘this is terrible!’. We wanted to twist it around and present it in a completely different way. Humour is really great for that, because it’s disarming. You sneak into people’s minds when they laugh at something. We’ve always thought that if you laugh at something it means there’s a better chance to convert you.
Anonymity is obviously also important to the identity of the group, but what I’ve always liked is that you are present whilst anonymous, that you appear in person wearing your masks. It’s not like an internet anonymity completely removed from a physical reality.Is the face to face aspect as important as the visuals?
FK: It is, but it is tiresome. It would be fun to appear as ourselves, but I’m sure that you’re more interested in us because we’re wearing these masks. It does say something important about the world that to be taken seriously as a feminist in the art world you have to wear a gorilla mask. It’s problematic in many ways but it’s something that worked for us early on and we’re kind of stuck with it. We’re not speaking as individuals, we’re speaking as members of a subclass of angry guerrillas!
KK: It’s interesting, because people think we’re performance artists, but we’re really not. We do a very particular kind of political art that is sometimes spoken, sometimes graphic, sometime video or outdoor banners. But our masks make us performative.
FK: There’s a long American tradition of masked avengers. They’re anonymous but they have a public presence. We’re in that tradition.
During my research for this interview I came across a member of the group saying that progress is always two steps forward and one step back. Do you think that accounts for the wider climate of political regression we’re living through, with Trump, Brexit and everything else?
FK: Absolutely. The patriarchy is not going down quietly. The patriarchy is going down angry, and I think you can see that everywhere.
And having now been making such influential work over such a long period, do you see your influence in other groups or activist collectives? Are there any specific groups that you’ve noticed carrying on your work, or work like it?
KK: We do hear from a lot of people who say that we influenced them. We get all kinds of letters every year from all kinds of people, all over the world, every gender and from many, many different countries saying that they are using our work as a model for their own.
FK: I tend to think that we’re all riding on the same wave. We’re running a complaints department at Tate Modern every day from the 3–9 October, for example, and we’re inviting everyone to come complain about all kinds of issues. We’ve invited a lot of groups to come and bring all of their incredible work. It isn’t just about art, come complain about politics, social issues, economic issues, personal venting, whatever people want to come and do.
Influential: Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? poster. Courtesy of the Guerrilla Girls
What have been your biggest victories?
FK: To get other people to count for us. All of a sudden we see people in the press commenting about the representation of women and artists of colour in exhibitions. It’s great when someone else does your dirty work for you.
KK: Certainly our most influential work, the poster that asked whether women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum, really changed a lot of things. It’s a perfect example of what we do. After seeing that poster, if you really read it and it gets inside your brain, then you can’t go to a museum and look at things the same way ever again. We try every time to do something that is unforgettable in some way, and that one works.
Could you imagine a time when the Guerrilla Girls will stop making work? Perhaps because you felt the art world had changed enough so that you weren’t needed anymore?
KK: Well that’s never going to happen. There’s the whole world of culture that needs to change, including film and television, which we’ve done some work in. Firstly, I want to say that you’re talking to us today but we’re not the entire Guerrilla Girls. We’ve always been multi-generational and diverse in a lot of other ways, and we are now as well. I guess it really depends on how it goes on. It’s amazing that through incredible passion and steadfastness of argument we’ve lasted this long.
FK: I really doubt that millennia of patriarchy will be wiped by 150 years of feminism. I think we need a little bit more time to figure it all out.
Guerrilla Girls: Is it Worse in Europe? is at the Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High St, E1 7QX until 5 March.
Why do fish school or birds flock together, and how can replicating this behaviour be of use to humans?
A collection of black random squiggles that last month adorned the walls of a café on Lower Clapton Road may hold the answer.
Said squiggles are the world’s first ‘autonomous paintings’, made by miniature robots and part of 28-year-old Danish architect Jens Pedersen’s research into self-organising behaviour.
“The reason why fish school and so on is essentially down to these really dumb rules, but through interaction these rules form global order or harmony,” says Pedersen, an architectural consultant who came to London as a student in 2010.
“I have looked at a lot of these systems digitally, figuring out how they work and now I’ve got to the point where I want to do them physically.”
The handiwork of Jens Pedersen’s robot creations. Photograph: Jens Pedersen
Making a robot is not as difficult – or expensive – as one might think. Pedersen uses a toy called Bristle Bots (“basically just the head of a toothbrush”), which he hooks up to a battery and a tiny vibrating motor normally found in old telephones.
“It’s super crude, you just take the toothbrush, dip it in paint and it starts moving around. The paint itself alters the canvas and that alters how the other robots interact with the canvas, so it becomes this feedback between how the other robots have moved around and the other robots adjust their behaviour,” says Pedersen.
Naysayers may at this point declare: ‘That’s not art!’ But Pedersen points out that applying paint randomly, as the robots do, is a technique reminiscent of some of the greats.
“Some of my friends who’ve seen them say it’s a little bit like Pollock and there’s that element of randomness in that I can’t replicate,” he says.
“It’s a different technique to introduce randomness into art and leave the quality of it to the beholder.”
Getting robots to make art for you smacks of automation gone mad. Where’s the creativity and what’s the end goal, I ask.
Pedersen says he has a “running joke” with himself that one day 2,000 robots like this could populate and explore the surface of Mars. His reasoning harks back to two opposing theories of robotics.
“A US university made this huge robot that calculated every step it would take to make sure it was accurate,” he says.
“Every little step would take a day, so it would move slowly.
“But then other people were hypothesising about these little robots that had an awareness of where the other guys were and would adjust their behaviour accordingly.
“Those robots would be really cheap and really dumb, but they would be able to cover more ground faster than the big highly intelligent robot.”
Mars and other worlds tomorrow, but for now Lower Clapton and a brief foray into the art world is excitement enough.
“It’s very interesting and I’ve thought a lot about it,” Pedersen enthuses.
“In a way if we make the grand parallel to how art has developed over time I think the use of robotics is a natural step – maybe not the use of robots but certainly the use of robots as a technique.
“So this could be seen as a purely technique driven progression within the field of art rather than just to say ‘I’ve made these little robots that can paint’.”
Chairs apparent: Lucy Ryder Richardson’s vintage market. Photograph: Modern Shows
Mad Men may no longer be on our screens, but the public appetite for sumptuous midcentury interior design continues apace.
“It’s the new antique,” says Lucy Ryder Richardson, one of the founders of Midcentury East, a biannual vintage furniture market taking place this month at the Erno Goldfinger-designed Haggerston School.
“Victorian and even Georgian furniture is going down in price but these pieces keep going up. It’s really snowballed.”
Midcentury modern is a term used to describe architecture, furniture and graphic design of the 1940s through to 1960s and early 1970s.
It was heavily influenced by modernism and embraced notions of elegance, functionality and simplicity.
Ryder Richardson is a self-confessed furniture fanatic who has recently cultivated an interest in one particular area: chairs.
Sitting pretty: George Nelson’s Coconut chair features in the book. Photograph: Modern Shows
Her book, 100 Midcentury Chairs and their stories, sounds like a niche subject, but apparently there is an army of chair aficionados out there who can’t get enough of our four-legged friends.
“I think pretty much everyone who comes to our shows is a tiny bit obsessed with chairs in particular and I feel the history of chairs tells an amazing post-war story,” exclaims Ryder Richardson.
The book starts with Finnish designer Alvar Aalto’s bentwood chairs, Bauhaus-inspired cantilevered designs constructed using a ground-breaking method for bending plywood. It closes with Frank Gehry’s corrugated cardboard Wiggle chair, a 1972 design that resembles the insides of a Twirl chocolate bar.
These designers are bookends for a chronological history of midcentury chair design. Featured chairs include the first plastic rocking chair, designed by husband and wife team Charles and Ray Eames, the first galvanised chair, a chair made from a crate, the famous minimalist zig-zag chair and Bruno Mathson’s Eva Chair, which used strapping instead of upholstery.
Behind the chairs
Ryder Richardson found the stories behind the chairs as fascinating as the designs themselves.
For example, the first ever televised US presidential election debate, between Kennedy and Nixon in 1960, is famous among furniture buffs for the chairs the nominees sat on.
“Midcentury fans will tell you it was the chairs that won the debate,” quips Ryder Richardson. “They were called Round Chairs, made by a guy called Hans Wegner who knocked them up in only 48 hours. It was a totally new departure – really light weight and open on all sides with tiny little finger joints.”
Intrigue
The book also delves into the intrigues and rivalries between designers and chair producers.
One of the more notorious of which is the creation story of the famous 1960s Cherner chair.
Its designer, Norman Cherner, had submitted plans for the chair to a production company called Plycraft. It was deemed too expensive to produce and the project was scrapped, but when Cherner walked into a New York showroom six months later he found a chair of the same design bearing the mysterious signature: ‘Bernardo’.
The name was a pseudonym for Plycraft’s owner, Paul Goldman, and in the resulting 1961 court case Plycraft was made to pay production royalties to Cherner, an arrangement that lasted well into the 1970s. Ryder Richardson sought out the children and grandchildren of designers for the book.
“I just became completely obsessed. My children now hate chairs – whenever they would sit down to eat there would be piles of chair books.”
Fashion is famously fickle, so is the public appetite for midcentury modern furniture just a passing trend? Ryder Richardson thinks not.
“They’re absolutely beautifully-made and so historically significant. People in the 1960s put their heart and soul into these pieces – they weren’t made to self-destruct like many pieces these days are these days, or even to last a few years – they were made for you to have for life.”
Isabel Sörling of Soil Collectors, playing at Match and Fuse Festival this month
15–16 October,Hackney Wonderland@ Oval Space, The Laundry, London Fields Brewery, Sebright Arms, The Pickle Factory
Five venues play host to a line-up of established bands such as Mystery Jets and We Are Scientists as well as up-and-coming acts like singer Sonia Stein and NGod.
21–23 October –Stoke Newington Music Festival @ various venues including Mascara Bar, St Pauls Church West Hackney, The Waiting Room, Haunt, Stereo92, The Lion, The Lacy Nook, Green Room Café, The Haberdashery
Three-day multi-venue event across Stoke Newington will see DJ sets and live music from the likes of Thurston Moore, Sterling Roswell, Pink Cigar and The Pacers
One of the nation’s best loved comic creations Super Hans from Peepshow (aka Australian comic Matt King) takes to the decks for his debut London DJ set.
Organisers boast this will be a “knees up like no other”, bringing together musicians from 14 European countries. Highlights include Portuguese trumpeter Susana Santos Silva and the Native American/Scandinavian pop improvisers the Soil Collectors.
29 October – Mirrors festival @ St John at Hackney, Moth Club, Oslo, Round Chapel
Eyes will be on the Mercury Prize-nominated Bat for Lashes, who is set to headline this one-day indoor festival. Also on the line-up are Allah-Las, Bill Ryder Jones and the curiously-named garage punk six-piece Diarrhea Planet.
Protesters fought running battles with the police. Photograph: Cable Street Group
Eighty years ago, on 4 October 1936, thousands of East Londoners stood together to oppose fascists who wanted to march through the then predominantly Jewish neighbourhood of Stepney.
The Battle of Cable Street, as it became known, is now regarded as a defining moment in East London’s history.
To mark its 80th anniversary this month residents and local organisations will be holding a series of commemorative events.
The Tower Hamlets’ Grand Union Orchestra is hosting a week of concerts aiming to encapsulate the mood and memory of the Battle of Cable Street and explore the influence it has today – particularly on those communities still facing racial prejudice.
“Our intention is to give a voice to as many strands in the local community as possible, whether recalling the events of 1936, or recounting experiences of similar events since,” said the orchestra’s director and composer Tony Haynes.
Other commemorative events include a photography exhibition at Watney Market Idea Store (part of Photomonth) and a historical walking tour of the East End led by author David Rosenberg, who will also be hosting a panel discussion about the events of October 1936 and the subsequent story of the mural depicting the battle on the wall of St George’s Town Hall in Cable Street.
‘They Shall Not Pass’. Protesters on the barricades at the Battle of Cable Street. Photograph: Tower Hamlets History Library
Then on 9 October a commemorative march will get underway in Altab Ali Park before proceeding to the Cable Street mural for a rally, where local MP Rushanara Ali and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn are expected to speak.
During the 1930s economic instability and unemployment created a climate of ideological conflict all over Europe, allowing Hitler to come to power in Germany.
Britain was not immune from this climate of intolerance, with the Jewish community in Stepney becoming a target.
The Blackshirts of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists party used militant tactics similar to Hitler’s Brownshirts in Nazi Germany.
The party drew huge crowds at their rallies and planned to march through Stepney to mark their fourth anniversary.
Nearly 100,000 East Londoners, both Jews and non-Jews, petitioned home secretary John Simon to stop the march going ahead.
He refused, and instead deployed record numbers of police to secure the Blackshirts’ route.
But on the day of the march, a coalition of anti-fascist protesters, Jews, dockers, Irish labourers and communists, vastly outnumbered the police and Blackshirt marchers.
As many as 250,000 people are thought to have assembled to oppose the march. Barricades were set up, bricks were thrown, and women are said to have tipped the contents of their chamber pots on the police from upstairs windows.
The police retreated and cancelled the march to prevent bloodshed although around 200 people were injured and many arrests made.
Marie Joseph, aged 94, remembers first hand the Battle of Cable Street.
“I was 14 at the time and my brother was 12 and we both went along to see what was going to unfold,” she said.
“Word quickly got around that Mosley was going to march through the streets, the whole neighbourhood knew.
“We saw the Blackshirts approaching and they were pelted with eggs straight away.
“The police and their enormous horses tried to disperse the crowds, I couldn’t see Mosley, just a line of people, but I believe he was carefully escorted away by the police.
“I now live in Loughton, but I still go up to Stepney every Tuesday and Thursday because I volunteer in the Jewish Community Centre. The area’s changed a lot, but the memories still remain.”
See cablestreet80.org.ukfor more details of the events taking place for the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street.
Today: the Cable Street mural on St George’s Town Hall. Photograph: Max Eckersley
The Thames Estuary. Photograph: Simon Fowler. Part of After London at Cass Bank Gallery
As an area famously teeming with artists East London has always been an eminently suitable location for Photomonth. In October the UK’s largest photography festival returns, with some 100 galleries and art spaces opening their doors for free exhibitions, workshops and talks covering a colossal range of topics, from the Battle of Cable Street to homelessness and the refugee crisis. Here is our – by no means exhaustive – guide to the festivities ahead.
From Children of Vision series by Alina Kisina. Part of The Disinherited at The Print Space gallery
The Disinherited
Photomonth launches with The Disinherited, featuring specially commissioned work by three photographers. For her series Children of Vision, Alina Kisina took portraits of pupils at a special art school in Kiev for the blind and partially sighted to illustrate how creativity can transform lives. Heather McDonough’s Leave to Remain series is inspired by a period she spent volunteering in French refugee camps and her encounters not only with the people there but also with objects left lying spent and discarded. Big Red is Ed Thompson’s visual essay on homelessness, inspired by the story of a man who turned his back on London life in favour of a nomadic existence in his Big Red van.
Until 17 October, The Print Space Gallery, 74 Kingsland Road, E2 8DL theprintspace.co.uk
Photographer Karen Harvey, set to feature in Girl Town at St Margaret’s House. Photograph: Karen Harvey
Girl Town
Celebrating the “culture of the female” in the 21st century, Girl Club is an exhibition anyone – professional or amateur – can submit work for, using the hashtag #girltownPM on Instagram. Talks, including one on photojournalist Jane Bown, as well as film screenings are also in the offing over the course of the month.
6 October – 1 November, St Margaret’s House, 21 Old Ford Road, Bethnal Green, E2 9PL stmargaretshouse.org.uk
‘They Shall Not Pass’: East Londoners at the Battle of Cable Street in October 1936. Photograph: Tower Hamlets History Library
80th Anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street
On 4 October 1936 East Londoners came together to stop Oswald Mosley and his fascist ‘Blackshirts’ from marching through Cable Street in Stepney, then a predominantly Jewish area. 80 years on and the Cable Street Group is to hold an exhibition of photographs of the Battle of Cable Street, alongside other memorabilia and events to remember this important moment in East End history.
Until 18 October, Idea Store Watney Street, 260 Commercial Road, E1 2FB ideastore.co.uk
An image from Dalston Carnival, which features in Dalston Street Show. Photograph: Tom Ferrie
Dalston Street Show
Images of the many faces of Dalston – its people, streets and buildings – will adorn shop windows, restaurants, bars, cafés and Dalston venues this month. Featuring an array work by local photographers such as Dougie Wallace, the Dalston Street Show opens on 14 October in Dalston Square with an event that will see a giant inflatable screen display images from the show with a musical accompaniment from Band Off the Wall.
Thames Estuary, from After London exhibition at Cass Bank Gallery. Photograph: David George
After London
Essex-based artist Simon Fowler has created an intimate portrait of the Thames Estuary in an exhibition that coincides with the publication of Estuary: Out from London to the Sea by East London writer Rachel Lichtenstein. Another strand of the exhibition is Estuary English by David George, whose own photographic exploration of the Thames Estuary focuses on the region’s gothic associations.
Until 15 October, Cass Bank Gallery, 59-63 Whitechapel High Street, E1 7PF londonmet.ac.uk/thecass
Best of the rest
Territorial – 20 October–20 November, Bank Space Gallery, The Cass, 59-63 Whitechapel High Street
Showcasing the work of six contemporary photographic practitioners whose work is concerned with concepts of human geography, identity and territory.
Domestic Disorder – Until 5 November, Idea Store Canary Wharf
Images by Sian Bonnell that challenge ideas of the ordered domestic life.
Uncertain States – 4 November – 27 November, Mile End Arts Pavilion, Grove Road
Fifty artists present a selection of contemporary and thought provoking photography in annual exhibition.
The Transaction – Until 13 October, Canvas Café, 42 Hanbury Street
Exhibition about people in India who work in public spaces. Artist Kathryn Geels tasked herself with one job: to get them to smile for the camera.
Lived Brutalism: Portraits at Robin Hood Gardens – 3 October–21 October, St Matthias Community Centre, 113 Poplar High Street
Photographs recording the lives of residents at Robin Hood Gardens the ‘streets in the sky’ development currently facing demolition.
Artist Gavin Turk at Hackney WickED. Photograph: Anna Maloney
Plans to ringfence dedicated zones to offer protection from developers and rising rents have been given a cautious welcome by Hackney Wick artist Gavin Turk.
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan’s culture chief Justine Simons is working on proposals to stem the numbers of creatives being priced out of the city through the creation of a “creative enterprise zone”.
But Turk, who is considered one of the Young British Artists whose work gained notoriety at the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art in the mid 1990s, told the London Citizen that there were pros and cons to such schemes.
He said Simon’s proposals were “all good” but that they “might start to create an unfortunate situation where you say one artist is worth keeping and another isn’t”.
Turk added: “There is culturally a problem in this country where the arts are seen as a Sunday activity, and accordingly artists are an underclass who aren’t very well paid.”
He also warned there could be “problems with the idea of government legitimation of art”.
He said: “When I was doing a residency in Paris back in the late 1980s, the government there were keen to protect artists in certain areas – so in the Bastille you had artists running away from the government’s patronising [of them] because they felt it undermined the creativity of their practice.
“There’s a massive contradiction there, and it’s a very difficult thing to approach.”
But the 48-year-old artist praised Ms Simons for taking steps to stop artists being priced out of London.
“UK culture is quite bad at seeing and respecting art, but the country actually does quite well by its creative cultural production: design, art, advertising, film and music,” he said.
“So it’s good that she [Simons] has made a call and said ‘let’s go appreciate these artists and make an investment in them’.”
Turk’s current exhibition at Hackney Wick’s Béton Brut Gallery tackles the subject of gentrification.
“It’s a story that’s told over and over: artists go to cheap places, they create an energy, and people start to be drawn to these areas, and then property developers see that attraction and excitement and start coming in to build flats,” Turk said.
“It’s funny, because in a way artists are actually part of the gentrification process. There’s actually an economic value to their cultural capital – artists are financially valuable.
“Developers should almost be paying them, but how do you do something like that legislatively? Maybe there could be studio spaces on the bottom floor of these expensive flats? But then, I’m not sure artists would be interested.”
Professor Simon Robertshaw from the University of East London is among those who have given their backing to the idea of protected areas for artists.
He said: “The way in which London actually supports its artists isn’t great. I think we’ve got to start having protected zones for artists’ rents.
“My staff who are artists are now moving out of London to Margate or Folkestone or Hastings because that’s what they can afford.”
Following Skepta’s Mercury Prize win, 2016 could be seen as the the year that grime came of age.
Grime isn’t just about music: for a whole generation, this is a definitive lifestyle and culture. Back in Bow in the early 2000s, however, the artists who would go on to be considered as the founding fathers of grime weren’t expecting much.
Though it seems almost surreal to think of them in this way now, most of grime’s big names were just school friends in East London’s council estates, messing about in their free time.
With This Is Grime journalist Hattie Collins allows for a fascinating, unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at the musical revolution that has defined a generation.
It is an impressive compilation of interviews with the key figures involved and, of course, there’s no one better equipped to be telling the story of the scene than the people at the centre of it all (especially given that Collins speaks to fellow journalists too, allowing for a degree of outsider commentary).
In many ways it’s more of a sourcebook than anything: you can imagine in all future think-pieces and books on grime, This Is Grime will provide a wealth of the references and key quotes.
Stormzy. Photograph: Olivia Rose
The book intimately charts the timeline of grime: born out of jungle raves and pirate radio, and the years that saw it rising to its current dominant state, via backlash, violence, and mainstream recognition.
There’s conversations with some of the up and coming names in the scene alongside the hallowed fathers Wiley, Dizzee and Kano. And, of course, there’s a look into the sensational rise of the Adenuga family (aka Skepta, JME and Julie).
The accompanying photographs – taken exclusively for the book by Olivia Rose – are wonderfully atmospheric, and add to the visceral nature in which the story is told.
In allowing the book to be told solely by the interviewees, Collins has allowed for a refreshing open-endedness at some points: for example, at the beginning of the book many MCs and producers say that grime could never have happened without the UK garage scene, which heavily inspired it.
For others, grime was more of an aggressive reaction to the perceived pomposity of garage.
Birthplace of grime: East London. Photograph: Olivia Rose
Like the music itself, things aren’t sugar-coated in the book: the artists don’t shy away from the reality of stabbings and disaffected youth. In the past, UK politicians have voiced an unease with the style, fearing a glorification of violence (though is hard to not consider this fear as at least slightly racially motivated).
But the artists make the valid point that grime was born out of their reality: that the music gains its raw energy in channelling those aggressions.
Crazy Titch, in his taking down of garage, points out that the scene was unrelatable: rather than songs about champagne and fancy cars, grime was the not-always pleasant truth about the ends they all grew up in.
The interview-style of the book does at points make you want some actual narrative from someone not at the centre of it all, and at times you even crave a documentary: it can feel the equivalent of reading a script rather than getting to watch the play.
Overall, though, it’s a wonderful, intricate snapshot of an immensely important movement in British culture. It perhaps doesn’t offer much to those without a basic awareness of the scene, but for most who are interested in the story, This Is Grime has a lot to offer.
In a musical landscape largely dominated by beige pop, grime has injected the sound of something other into the British scene: something exciting, different, and completely local.
This Is Grime captures the thrill and disbelief driving the movement so far, and is endearing in its candid insights into the past decade.
What makes the book particularly exciting is the knowledge that there’s still plenty to come from the scene. To quote JME: “It’s only the end of the beginning.”
Novelist, Footsie and D Double E. Photograph: Olivia Rose
(l-r): Dan Leavers, Shabaka Hutchings and Max Hallett as jazz three-piece The Comet is Coming. Photograph: Fabrice Bourgelle
The story of The Comet is Coming is the stuff of dreams for aspiring bands: a serendipitous meeting of musical minds and an album, thrown together out of sheer enthusiasm and a series of creative epiphanies, that propelled the East London-based group into the national spotlight. Last weekend the cosmic jazz trio, fronted by charismatic sax-player Shabaka Hutchings (aka King Shabaka), played a headline set to a delighted crowd at a rain-soaked Chatsworth Road festival. Tonight, the group’s debut album Channel the Spirits will be up against the likes of David Bowie and Radiohead for the coveted Mercury Prize. Max Hallett (aka Betamax Killer) is the group’s drummer, as well as a composer and production guru. The 31-year-old here talks about musical experiments, why Hackney is still the place to be for artists and how space is “a blank canvas of imagination”.
Channel the Spirits was written and recorded in Hackney. How has working in the borough shaped your music?
I’ve been living in and around Hackney for about 10 years and I think there is a kind of edginess to the art that’s created here, though probably that was more so a few years back. People travel in from all round to go there and make stuff. I live further east now in Forest Gate but we all travel in because it’s still the place to get stuff done really. We’ve got a studio space in Stoke Newington in a place called the Total Refreshment Centre. It’s kind of our ‘HQ’, and is where we recorded the album. It used to be a Jamaican community centre I think but now it’s a recording and rehearsing space. They used to do a lot of parties and gigs there too and there’s lots of bands and artists going through there all the time so it’s part of a little scene really.
How did the band form and what brings you guys together musically?
Me and the keyboard player Dan [Dan Leavers, aka Danalogue the Conqueror] were already in a band called Soccer96 and have been playing together since we were at university. We did this gig and Shabaka came along with his saxophone. He’d been coming to a couple of our gigs and just showed up and jumped up on stage towards the end of the gig. We started playing and it unleashed this really big energy onstage. It was quite serene and then afterwards we were like, ‘okay, we need to go in the studio.’
And you recorded the album then and there?
Yeah, without doing any more gigs really we just went into the studio to do something that became the album. At the beginning we didn’t even know it was going to be a band. We just started recording. So the album is really the beginning of the band, because the album and last year’s EP (Prophecy) were taken from the same sessions.
Can you talk me through the making of the album?
Me and Dan had already started producing our own sound in the studio using reel to reel recording and a lot of improvising. We were just perfecting this method when we met Shabaka so he just sort of walked into this process. We must have written and recorded the album in about six days, then Dan and I mixed it in my garden shed during the winter. We tend to write whilst mixing too so we added a lot of laser sounds and some recordings from space. We just tried to fill it with interesting sounds from start to finish basically.
How surprised were you to receive a nomination for the Mercury Prize?
We were doing a gig in Portugal when we heard about it. We had a vague idea something was going on, and then Shabaka got a phone call and went outside. We started joking saying maybe that’s the Mercury nomination – and it was. So we just went straight down to the beach and went swimming in the sea. It was a really nice day and there was a really amazing vibe.
A lot of people are talking of The Comet is Coming and making comparisons with the world music pioneer Sun Ra. Do you think that’s fair?
I think everyone would agree that Sun Ra sounds very different to what we do. But because he used space and themes of space and created a mythology for himself, he has been quite inspiring. As soon as we realised this was going to be a spacy project it suddenly opened our creativity to a new direction and everything made perfect sense. We were kind of freed from our own culture in a way and reimagining our whole world at this point. Another thing is that Sun Ra’s band, the Sun Ra Arkestra, is still going and Shabaka is actually a member of that group. So he’s had some guidance from those guys as well – there’s a personal connection on his part.
Shabaka Hutchings has said that the thing that unites you three is the “knowledge that we’re in space”. Could you talk a bit more about this and what it is about space and the cosmos that inspires you?
Space is like a blank canvas of imagination really, because there are so many things that we don’t really understand or haven’t discovered. That’s kind of how our musical journey has been. The studio became our space mission, and it sounds cheesy but space taught us to use the equipment a bit like a science experiment. We’ve been trying to reconnect with music as a form of science. Science and music and spirituality at one point were all the same thing. They’ve branched out into different meanings, but I guess we’re trying to bring them back together and explore them and understand they were once just one idea.
What’s you own musical background?
I’m from a musical family – my parents are both musicians, so yeah I studied piano and met Dan at Sussex University where we both studied composition. But we got more into a beatnik kind of vibe and started going a bit more experimental. We all play in a lot of different bands around London because on a practical level it’s very healthy to be in a lot of bands because you get more experience, and also you have more work.
As serial collaborators how do you rate London’s alternative jazz scene – is it in good health?
Yeah, I’d say. Particularly in Hackney and parts of South London. But I think there’s a certain vibe of jazz music that has been collected within another scene. Basically there’s so much overlap of the genres that you’re starting to blur all the boundaries. I think in places like Hackney you can see that happen a lot, jazz musicians playing with non-jazz musicians.
Are you going to carry on making music together as a three-piece?
We’ve got another EP that we’ve already finished that will be coming out early next year, and there’s also been talks of maybe making a second album, which I think the label people are kind of keen on. But yeah, I’m sure we’ll try to continue making more experiments.
