East End Review

Author: East End Review

  • Creating a safe space with Arch 76

    Bethnal Green
    A painting by one of the participants in the Arch 76 project in Bethnal Green. Photograph by Eleonore de Bonneval

    Down a back road in Bethnal Green, tucked under the smog-stained railway bridge, a grey dingy arch has come to life with colour. Artwork explodes on the walls; knitted blankets, golden prophecy paintings, and jewellery made from old car tyres are crammed into every corner. Inside, 12 women, old and young, talk over each other to show off their art and tell their stories.

    “When I first came here I was so dirty, you could stick me to the walls,” says Tracy, 41. “It saved my life this place. It gave me hope, it gave me love and it gave me friendship. I’d never done anything like this before.” Arch 76 is a charity-based art project that was set up two years ago by Wendy Rolt. The idea was to create a safe space for vulnerable women to gather; away from men; sheltered from the streets where many of them have lived, and far from the drugs and abuse that had made them lose hope.

    In the whitewashed brick room, through a combination of artwork and group chats, many of the women who are battling addiction or mental illness, have found a new focus in painting. Tracy has become deeply entrenched in the religious aspect of the group. Though women from all faiths are welcome, she draws on the short bible passages they read each time they meet, depicting, with massive swirls of gold paint what she’s understood. She points at one of her pictures hung on the wall. “In this story, this person was murdered by his half-brother. A lot of those stories, you see, we can relate to.”

    The art project has become a community staple in Bethnal Green. Although the location is kept quiet for the security of the women, local cafés and cinemas have provided breakfasts and organised film outings. A gallery in Brick Lane helped them put on an exhibition of their work, with the money from sales going straight into their pockets. “It was the first time some of them had made any money themselves,” says Rolt. “ – at least legally.”

    Most of the women who attend come regularly, and they see the group as family – for some it’s the only one they’ve ever had. And for others, it’s the only time they’ve had the chance to have their voice heard, either through group chats or by using the myriad of supplies that burst out of drawers and cabinets. “I don’t think that art is the answer,” says Rolt, who volunteered at a rehab centre before starting the charity. “But it’s a way of being creative, and it really encourages them. Some are more shy, and the group meetings bring out more in them.”

    She adds: “We once read a story about fasting. And it brought out a lot of the women saying they fast – but not out of choice. Until then they’d been too scared to tell people they had run out of food money.” After that, many of the group members brought in extra food to share when they met twice a week.

    “I know we can’t do everything, and that can be hard,” says Rolt. “We have to be really honest. We can’t do their housing, we can’t do their benefits, but we can be there for each other through all of that. It’s what friends are for. We have a lot of birthday parties here. Some of the women have never even had a cake.”

    www.arch76.co.uk

  • A counter-cultural force – Hannah Höch comes to the Whitechapel Gallery

    Hannah Hoch 009
    Kleine Sonne (Little Son), 1969, collage by Hannah Hoch. Courtesy of Landsbank Berlin AG

    Looking at the clamorous photomontages of Hannah Höch is always a slightly overwhelming – albeit eye-opening – experience.

    Here the viewer is tasked with navigating visual planes littered with references to everything from heads of state and showgirls to lipstick, finance and fatherhood culled from the popular press.

    Born in the German town of Gotha in 1889, Höch learnt her trade as an artist in Berlin where, in 1919, she joined her then partner Raoul Hausmann, as well as George Grosz, John Heartfield and Johannes Baader in becoming a member of the left-wing, avant-garde Berlin Dada Group.

    In the incendiary interwar years, Höch’s carefully crafted works cut a metaphorical knife through the dizzying contradictions of rampant consumer culture, bloated German militarism and the ambiguous role of women.

    A new exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery is dedicated to her career, spanning six tumultuous decades from the 1910s to the 1970s. It is the first major retrospective of Höch’s work in the UK and a testament to the current groundswell of interest in this most intriguing of creative forces.

    “I think she was an artist who truly realised the political and poetical potential of images, what I would call the further realms of images as a counter-cultural force,” says exhibition co-curator Daniel Herrmann.

    “Her rambunctious spirit and rebellious nature saw her produce acerbic, socially and politically engaged imagery, transforming the means of working with collages, abstraction, materiality and challenging the construction of beauty.”

    Höch combined new modes of seeing such as aerial photography and microscopy with embroidery patterns and snippets from trashy magazines to dissect the much-hyped construct of the sexually liberated, working ‘New Woman’ of the Weimar Republic.

    It is perhaps her uncanny ability to expose the ironies behind the subtle (and not so subtle) manipulation of images of women for various commercial and political ends – served, albeit, with a thick slice of ambivalence – that strikes with such poignancy today.

    Take for example her short essay The Painter (c.1920), a wonderfully witty take-down of the myth of the male artist genius involving an abstract painting, a row about whose turn it is to wash the dishes and a bunch of chives.

    In her most famous work, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919-20), there are cut-out words from newspapers among the wheels and cogs of the slick new machine culture alongside dislocated pieces of architecture and animals.

    Look closely and you’ll find Marx and Lenin and a tiny map of Europe illustrating countries where women had the right vote. At the centre of it all, the decapitated body of dancer Niddy Impekoven pirouettes elegantly beneath the floating head of artist Käthe Kollwitz.

    In High Finance (1923), a double-barrel shotgun, the black, white and red flag of the German Reich and English chemist John Herschel are deployed to critique the relationship between financiers and the military in a disastrous period of economic crisis.

    More than most, Höch was acutely aware of the painful gap between public rhetoric and private reality.

    During the Second World War, Höch was blacklisted by the Nazis who included her work in the notorious Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich in 1937. Höch survived the war by retreating to a remote house on the outskirts of Berlin and a period of “lyrical abstraction”.

    Höch continued to produce works until her death in 1978 and the exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery offers a rare chance to get up close with over 100 collages, photomontages, watercolours and woodcuts from various stages of her career, examples of which are, sadly, so few and far between in British collections.

    Hannah Höch is at the Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX from 15 January – 23 March

     

  • Ears to the ground: an interview with Field Day founder Tom Baker

    Eat Your Own Ears founder Tom Baker
    Tom Baker of live music promoters Eat Your Own Ears

    The health of London’s live music scene is mainly a reflection of the calibre and variety of its artists but those who facilitate that experience deserve some credit too.

    Tom Baker is the mastermind behind Eat Your Own Ears, a company he founded in 2001 that has become a major force in promoting live music.

    After starting the company in 2001, he help the likes of Fourtet, Hot Chip and Florence and the Machine in their early years, and in 2007 found Field Day, the annual music festival that sees 30,000 people trek to Victoria Park each year.

    His secret, it seems, is to take your chances when they come. After graduating in arts management, he moved to London to work at the Scala in Kings Cross. It was one day while flyering that fortune struck.

    “A friend who worked at 93 Feet East on Brick Lane asked me if I’d thought about doing my own night,” he explains. “He offered me the venue and said he’d help if I came up with some ideas.”

    The next step involved putting his university research into action. Tom’s dissertation had been on independent versus major record labels, which gave him the idea to approach labels like Domino, Rough Trade and Warp with the idea of putting on nights where a new artist would be presented alongside the label’s more established artists.

    And this link to artists and labels remains, even though the company is much bigger.

    “It’s about the music we like and are passionate about and about working with artists we’ve worked with over time and finding and developing new ones,” he says.

    Such an attitude would stand any potential festival organiser in good stead, but the roots of Field Day are somewhat more idealistic.

    “It was inspired by an event called Return of the Rural,” he says. “Me, my brother and partner are all from Somerset, and at the time of Foot and Mouth we thought we’d put together an event that celebrates the countryside. We did it in the 291 Gallery in Hackney and it was a mixture of dance music, live bands and a ceilidh band.”

    Anyone who’s experienced Field Day will recognise the village fête in an urban setting vibe. The festival has grown year-on-year, and in 2014 will become a two-day event.

    “The Saturday will be the full onslaught with multiple stages and a mixture of dance music and live bands, new bands and world music, and the Sunday will be a scaled down version that’s accessible for people who have to go to work the next day,” he says.

    It promises to be a special year, with Pixies to headline the first ever Field Day Sunday and melancholic electronica masters Meteronomy confirmed as Saturday’s main act.

    Baker adds: “We’ve taken our time to take it to a second day until we felt comfortable we could do it and until we were sure we’d found the right act to launch it with.”

  • The Wapping Project powers down

    The Boiler Room at
    The Boiler Room at the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station

    When The Wapping Project first decided to use the hydraulic power station in Wapping for a site specific performance 20 years ago, it was derelict and disused.

    Jules Wright, founder and creative director, recalls: “It was the casual den for itinerant heroin users, but nonetheless it was one of the most exquisite buildings I had ever walked into and the area was exhilarating.

    The site had no buildings surrounding it other than a crumbling warehouse opposite, which housed leading fashion designers Ally Capellino and Fake London. Painters, sculptors and architects inhabited other nearby warehouses creating a vibrant area of creativity.

    “Things change however,” she says. “The warehouses are now converted. We can no longer see the river. The site is built out.”

    And although the project itself has not been affected by rising property prices, it has led to other artists vacating the area. This change has not only made it impossible to hold events outside the building, but has also made it a less appealing place for them to be.

    “As Wapping settles into a well-behaved neighbourhood, closer in spirit to a Surrey village than an inner London borough, and the developers move in to complete the gentrification, the time has also come for us to move on,” she says.

    The closure of the site is marked with a final show that has been in the planning for almost a decade. It’s the sixth in a series of photo-cinematic tales by Jules Wright and her long-time collaborator Thomas Zanon-Larcher.

    The Lady from the Sea is part installation and part a large-scale photographic essay that seeks to retell for a modern day audiences the Henrik Ibsen play of the same name. As the site’s final venture it promises to be fittingly dramatic, with visitors required to don Wellingtons as they watch the scenes play out in a recreated fisherman’s hut.

    The Lady from the Sea is at The Wapping Project, Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, Wapping Wall, E1W 3SG until 22 December.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Geraldine Pilgrim at Toynbee Hall

    Geraldine Pilgrim Toynbee, photo Hugo Glendinning
    Artist Geraldine Pilgrim at Toynbee Hall. Photograph: Hugo Glendinning

    Toynbee is an installation by artist Geraldine Pilgrim highlighting the social, political and artistic significance of Toynbee Hall and Studios.

    During its six-day run Pilgrim addresses significant issues and historical events connected to the Hall, which was founded in 1884, such as the match girls’ strike of 1888, William Beveridge’s first ideas about a Welfare State and unemployment, as well as the role of former politician John Profumo who volunteered at the Hall after the Profumo scandal of 1963.

    “Toynbee Hall is the most important building in Britain as far as I am concerned. So much has happened there over the years which sets changes in a variety of areas,” says Pilgrim.

    The building’s history of involvement with welfare issues is reflected throughout Toynbee, with Pilgrim revealing fragments of the past within a landscape of live music, image and performance.

    She adds: “It is a performance installation journey, which reveals glimpses of the past and present – people have probably never realised the history of the building and what has occurred there.”

    Toynbee – Geraldine Pilgrim is at Toynbee Hall and Studios, 28 Commercial Street, E1 6AB from 10 – 15 December

    toynbeehall.org.uk

  • Supporting Artists – Acme’s First Decade 1972-1982

    Acme Studios 009
    Acme studios: The first ten years

    It’s hard to imagine now just how different a landscape the decaying industrial wasteland of London’s East End presented in the early 1970s through the murky veil of economic recession.

    Here, among dormant factories, rotting riverside warehouses and boarded-up houses, a group of art school grads led by Jonathan Harvey and David Panton found their future.

    “When we approached the Greater London Council for property they said you can squat, because there was a huge amount of squatting going on then, in which case we’ll get you out, or go away and form yourself into a housing association that will give you the legal structure to have a conversation with us,” Harvey recalls at his top-floor office in Mile End.

    So in November 1972 seven founder members scraped together £10 apiece to form the artist-led charitable Acme Housing Association Ltd.

    The GLC initially transferred two derelict shops on Devons Road in Bow. By December 1974, Acme was managing 76 houses, providing living and studio space for 90 artists and had established a relationship with the Arts Council to provide funding for the conversion of the artists’ studios.

    “It’s quite extraordinary, we never planned to do it, it was always about self-help but then given the opportunity that these houses presented we thought well we must make them available to other artists,” Harvey says, evidently still somewhat surprised.

    After four pioneering decades, Acme is now the subject of a special show at the Whitechapel Gallery exploring its radical history through archive material including posters, catalogues, photographs and films.

    Radical experiment

    Part of what makes the Acme story so compelling is the five-and-a-half years the group spent from 1976-81 turning a derelict banana warehouse in Covent Garden into a cutting-edge exhibition space for an incredible array of (literally) ground-breaking performance and installation artists.

    “Being a short-life property that was due to for demolition, there was an attitude to the building that saw the space as sacrificial, so we quickly established a reputation for being uncompromising in terms of accommodating how an artist needed to present their work – even if it the space was being structurally challenged,” Harvey says.

    One of those artists was Kerry Trengove, who in 1977 famously sealed himself into a bunker inside the gallery, tunnelling his way down through the basement only   to emerge from a pile of rubble and dust on Shelton Street eight days later.

    Then there was pyrotechnic sculptor Stephen Cripps who performed several times at the gallery, filling the space with a volatile mix of fire and explosives.

    When it closed in 1981, critics mourned the loss of such an experimental, rebellious fixture on the gallery circuit, with Waldemar Januszczak declaring the 1970s “officially over.”

    Despite his obvious affection for those experimental, unselfconscious years full of energy and zeal, Harvey maintains it was right for the gallery to close when it did.

    “We’re talking about a period when that kind of 60s notion that an alternative to both commercial and public galleries could exist,” he says.

    “Now it’s very difficult to be a public museum or a public gallery without being part of the market. I think the market is actually totally dominant now, so there’s a big question about where the alternative is or indeed where the radical is.”

    Supporting artists

    Acme recognised long ago that its future depended on property ownership and, with aid of capital lottery funding from the Arts Council and planning partnerships with house builders, it has managed to secure a substantial property portfolio unlike any other studio organisation in the country.

    It’s a phenomenal though quiet success story of an organisation that Turner Prize-winning sculptor Rachel Whiteread, herself a former Acme studio holder (like roughly a third of all Turner Prize nominees, including eight winners), has called “silently one of the supportive bodies in operation.”

    It may have taken 40 years but by April 2015 Acme will be entirely independent and self-sustaining, slowly generating increasing amounts of income to invest back into the arts at a time when local authorities are highly unlikely to be able, or indeed willing, to ring-fence funding to subsidise affordable studio space.

    “Unfortunately I think there’s going to be a huge amount of loss of affordable studio space in the Eats End over the next few years. The rise in property prices in Hackney is absolutely extraordinary and how any artist can afford to live or work there in the future is really questionable,” Harvey says.

    “Our buildings are not going to be regenerated out.”

    Supporting Artists: Acme’s First Decade 1972-1982 runs at the Whitechapel Gallery until 23 February 2014

  • Supporting Artists – Acme’s First Decade 1972-1982

    Acme Studios 009
    Acme studios: The first ten years

    It’s hard to imagine now just how different a landscape the decaying industrial wasteland of London’s East End presented in the early 1970s through the murky veil of economic recession.

    Here, among dormant factories, rotting riverside warehouses and boarded-up houses, a group of art school grads led by Jonathan Harvey and David Panton found their future.

    “When we approached the Greater London Council for property they said you can squat, because there was a huge amount of squatting going on then, in which case we’ll get you out, or go away and form yourself into a housing association that will give you the legal structure to have a conversation with us,” Harvey recalls at his top-floor office in Mile End.

    So in November 1972 seven founder members scraped together £10 apiece to form the artist-led charitable Acme Housing Association Ltd.

    The GLC initially transferred two derelict shops on Devons Road in Bow. By December 1974, Acme was managing 76 houses, providing living and studio space for 90 artists and had established a relationship with the Arts Council to provide funding for the conversion of the artists’ studios.

    “It’s quite extraordinary, we never planned to do it, it was always about self-help but then given the opportunity that these houses presented we thought well we must make them available to other artists,” Harvey says, evidently still somewhat surprised.

    After four pioneering decades, Acme is now the subject of a special show at the Whitechapel Gallery exploring its radical history through archive material including posters, catalogues, photographs and films.

    Radical experiment

    Part of what makes the Acme story so compelling is the five-and-a-half years the group spent from 1976-81 turning a derelict banana warehouse in Covent Garden into a cutting-edge exhibition space for an incredible array of (literally) ground-breaking performance and installation artists.

    “Being a short-life property that was due to for demolition, there was an attitude to the building that saw the space as sacrificial, so we quickly established a reputation for being uncompromising in terms of accommodating how an artist needed to present their work – even if it the space was being structurally challenged,” Harvey says.

    One of those artists was Kerry Trengove, who in 1977 famously sealed himself into a bunker inside the gallery, tunnelling his way down through the basement only   to emerge from a pile of rubble and dust on Shelton Street eight days later.

    Then there was pyrotechnic sculptor Stephen Cripps who performed several times at the gallery, filling the space with a volatile mix of fire and explosives.

    When it closed in 1981, critics mourned the loss of such an experimental, rebellious fixture on the gallery circuit, with Waldemar Januszczak declaring the 1970s “officially over.”

    Despite his obvious affection for those experimental, unselfconscious years full of energy and zeal, Harvey maintains it was right for the gallery to close when it did.

    “We’re talking about a period when that kind of 60s notion that an alternative to both commercial and public galleries could exist,” he says.

    “Now it’s very difficult to be a public museum or a public gallery without being part of the market. I think the market is actually totally dominant now, so there’s a big question about where the alternative is or indeed where the radical is.”

    Supporting artists

    Acme recognised long ago that its future depended on property ownership and, with aid of capital lottery funding from the Arts Council and planning partnerships with house builders, it has managed to secure a substantial property portfolio unlike any other studio organisation in the country.

    It’s a phenomenal though quiet success story of an organisation that Turner Prize-winning sculptor Rachel Whiteread, herself a former Acme studio holder (like roughly a third of all Turner Prize nominees, including eight winners), has called “silently one of the supportive bodies in operation.”

    It may have taken 40 years but by April 2015 Acme will be entirely independent and self-sustaining, slowly generating increasing amounts of income to invest back into the arts at a time when local authorities are highly unlikely to be able, or indeed willing, to ring-fence funding to subsidise affordable studio space.

    “Unfortunately I think there’s going to be a huge amount of loss of affordable studio space in the Eats End over the next few years. The rise in property prices in Hackney is absolutely extraordinary and how any artist can afford to live or work there in the future is really questionable,” Harvey says.

    “Our buildings are not going to be regenerated out.”

    Supporting Artists: Acme’s First Decade 1972-1982 runs at the Whitechapel Gallery until 23 February 2014

  • Spitalfields Winter Festival – Remember Me: A Desk Opera

    Desk Opera - Claudia MolitorSpitalfields Music Winter Festival 009. Photo credit- Tommy Ga-Ken Wan
    Desk bound: Claudia Molitor. Photograph: Tommy Ga Ken Wan

    An opera which takes place inside a writing desk is to be performed for the first time in London as part of this month Spitalfields Music Winter Festival.

    Remember Me: A Desk Opera is inspired by a Victorian writing desk handed down to the opera’s composer, Claudia Molitor, from her grandmother.

    “This desk was the only space that was just hers, and it has a life time of experience with it – I am fascinated by it,” says Molitor.

    The opera uses a replica of the original desk as a focal point, accompanied by film, an orchestral pit visit and live performances.

    “The desk is the central focus, with performance going on around it, helping it to come alive.

    “I wanted to do something different when writing this opera – it means I can tell big opera-style stories on a small scale,” says Molitor.

    The opera tells a fictional story of two Greek heroines: Dido and Eurydice – both of whom are dissatisfied with their lives.

    “Dido laments the fact her husband is going around the world while she is left at home, while Eurydice’s husband Orpheus is an amazing musician and singer.

    “They are two women who are trapped and can’t do anything: Dido in the palace, and Eurydice in the underworld.

    “I thought what would happen if they were friends and moaned to each other about their lives,” Molitor says.

    The idea for Remember Me came early last year, when Molitor discovered a lot of composers were working on operas – something which she thought was “bizarre” in the 21st century.

    The opera uses no score or libretto, but instead makes use of a variety of recordings made by Molitor which are then put together for the performance.

    Molitor says she hopes Remember Me will appeal to a wide range of people when it comes to the Winter Festival this month.

    “It’s a playful attraction, as it is quite small and tiny,” she says.

    “The idea you can make stories from something from very little is almost like when children can spend hours creating and playing in their own imaginary worlds.”

    Remember Me: A Desk Opera  is at Rivington Place, EC2A 3BA from 9 – 10 December.

  • Culture on the couch: theatre performed in homes

    Capulanas Cia de Arte Negra performs Solano Trindade e suas Negras Poesias at a home in Horto
    Home Theatre in Brazil

    This month sees the broadcast of an ambitious international project featuring 30 new one-person shows performed in 30 homes across the capital. Organised by the theatre Royal Stratford East, the Home Theatre project aims to link boroughs with extremely low arts engagement to more affluent areas of the city, with artists working on the project taking inspiration from the stories of those hosting the performances in their own homes.

    Run in partnership with the Festival Internacional de Cenas em Casa (International Festival of Home Theatre), the idea to bring Home Theatre to the UK was inspired by artistic director Kerry Michael’s trip to Brazil earlier this year.

    “Home  Theatre is about staging performances in people’s familiar surroundings. In a sense, we will be serving our audiences and letting them be our masters. It’s about telling great stories from across the capital,” he says.

    “It’s also a great opportunity for artists and London audiences to come together, share a meal and have an open dialogue about their stories and the project.”

    Exploring the relationship between art and audiences, Home Theatre extends the legacy of the theatre Royal Stratford’s East Open Stage project, a radical community-curated programme aimed at redefining who decides and makes theatre and how it is made and presented.

    The collaboration between the 30 hosts, artists and filmmakers should generate exciting new ideas and insights for staging and creating theatre outside of established venues and in the very heart of local communities.

    For your viewing pleasure, a film of each bespoke performance will be released every 30 minutes on the theatre’s online performance platform and at the theatre itself as part of the Home Theatre 30 x 30 digital event taking place on Saturday 9 November.

  • A Season of Bangla Drama – preview

    Scene from Ayndrilla Singharay's Unsung to be performed at Wilton's Music Hall
    Scene from Ayndrilla Singharay’s Unsung

    Now in its eleventh year, Tower Hamlets Council presents A Season of Bangla Drama, a vibrant celebration of local Bengali talent.

    Taking place throughout November the festival includes an array of drama and discussion performed at a variety of venues across Spitalfields and Bethnal Green, continuing its relevance to residents of Tower Hamlet today.

    The programme combines long-established aspects of Bengali tradition with innovative productions exploring recent developments in the culture, continuing with its deliverance of social history.

    Drawing inspiration from the literary tales of Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore, a number of the performances bring to life issues that still resonate through society decades after having first been written.

    As part of the festival Wilton’s Music Hall will be featuring “Unsung”, a performance inspired by one of Tagore’s most haunting short stories. Bringing the story into the contemporary space of modern day London it tells the tale of two brothers and their wives and the horrific events that take place within their family unit, exploring issues of female oppression in society that still remain topical to this day.

    Francis Mayhew, Artistic Director at Wilton’s said: “A Season of Bangla Drama, presented by Tower Hamlets Council, is a growing artistic success story and we are really delighted to be supporting the next generation of new artists and new work.”

    The hall will also host a performance from Komola Collective that provides an insight into the events that unfolded during the 1971 war of independence struck Bangladesh. The war displaced over 30 million people and saw large-scale atrocities occur, and “Birangona: Women of War” displays such crimes against women through the story of one woman and her family.

    The festival aims to entertain its audiences while facilitating discussion on hard-hitting topics that often go untold.

    A Season of Bangla Drama is on at multiple locations throughout East London from 2nd – 24th November. Prices and times vary.