With more than 100 Photomonth exhibitions to take in over October and November, and at least 500 contributing artists, it is understandably difficult to know exactly where to focus one’s gaze.
The state of London today is a common theme among work presented this year. For his satirical series Harrodsburg, Glaswegian Dougie Wallace ventured into West London, where he papped the mega rich out shopping in what he calls a “story of glut, greed and the widening wealth gap”.
Portraits of a different kind line the walls of one East End institution. Seven photographers have snapped the tourists, shoppers, revellers and stressed out office workers who frequent Brick Lane Beigel Bake, with the results on display there this month.
6am by Jonathan Goldberg part of Twentyfour7 exhibition. Until 22 November at Brick Lane Beigel Bake
The future of East London in the face of luxury blocks of flats and rising living costs is of concern to Hackney Wick resident Ansell Cizic. In The Wick and Beyond, he records those artists whose very presence in the East has helped it become an attractive proposition for property developers.
Venice Mob from East End, by Ansell Cizic. The Wick and Beyond until 1 November at Well Hung Gallery
Jerwood Drawing Prize nominee Pete Burke takes a more voyeuristic look at what the future holds. Glimpsing the Future is a series of photographs taken through building site peepholes in Hackney, which he is displaying alongside drawings that act as a route between them.
Not all the exhibitions are about the here and now. Syd Shelton’s photographs of the 1970s Rock Against Racism movement capture an intriguing political period in which musicians and political activists confronted racist ideology on the streets and in parks.
Photograph by Syd Shelton, part of Rock Against Racism, until 5 December at Autograph ABP
Global issues come to the fore with Africa’s Last Colony, which remembers conflict in Western Sahara 40 years ago with never before seen images by UK-based photographers , while Kites from Kabul, a series of photographs of kite flying sights around Kabul and Bamiyan, provides an insight into the lives of children living in war-torn Afghanistan. (12)
Quintana Valero, Africa’s Last Colony: 40 Years Not Forgotten, until 28 October at Hundred Years GalleryOculi by Andrew Quilty, part of Kites from Kabul, until 3 January at the V&A Museum of Childhood
As usual for Photomonth, there’s a staggering breadth of work on display, with subjects that push boundaries and defy categorisation. Zoo Logic by David O’Shaughnessy looks at captivity through photographs of the environments in which zoo animals are presented to the public, and Piotr Karpinski’s photographs of people doing strange things in morgues and graveyards view life and death with humour and originality.
Cercopithecus Wolfi by David O’Shaughnessy, part of Zoo Logic. Until at Stour Space
Deciding where to go is perhaps the main drawback to Photomonth, but with the standards of exhibitions seemingly ever rising there’s a fair chance that whatever you choose will be a winner.
Eye-popping palette… Roberta Einer’s SS16 collection
East London designers brought a dash of daring and surprise to London Fashion Week Spring/Summer 16, with eighties nostalgia and experimental knitwear referenced on catwalks and in presentations.
Peter Jensen, based on Shacklewell Lane, referenced sixties and eighties Americana in his SS16 presentation, with pinafores and shirt collars, stitched name badges, polo shirts and jean jackets in primary colours. Monochrome prints on Jensen’s signature twin sets and sweaters were paired with visor-helmets for a futuristic twist.
Also playing with black and white was Phoebe English with her deconstructed collection in silks and taffeta. Shirts looked like they’d been unstitched and put back together; Japanese ties, ruched fabric straps and sashes of fabric were used as simple tech-free fastenings.
Leather stirrups, silk ruched Bardot tops and opaque white tights were brought to life at Claire Barrow’s presentation through her surreal illustrations and dystopian messages. Models wielded musical instruments against a dark backdrop of draped fabric and wore vintage drawn-on jeans, jumpsuits and oversized power suits, reminiscent of a moody eighties band practice. For her twisted vision of Dallas, Barrow used a lot of silk fabrics as her canvas, challenging the feminine ideal and playing with sensuality, heightened by the mixed-sex casting.
Roberta Einer SS16
Faustine Steinmetz was acknowledging her tools and craft for SS16, with garments looking like they’d been pulled off the huge handlooms, which she works on in her East London studio. Denim jackets disintegrated into loose threads at the bottom, curtains of thread made for casualwear motifs on sweaters. For her presentation the French designer had models coming out of the walls, missing limbs, which only enhanced the distorted proportions of the clothes and the surreal element of her collection.
Crash and repair were themes for Christopher Kane’s SS16 collection, and his use of deconstructed fabric and pulled threads reinforced these ideas, turning them into motifs on sweaters and fringing on skirts, this time in primary colours. The collection was unpredictable and varied in its offer, from abstracted wavy cloud silhouettes and rainbow fades, to geometric panelled dresses and block colour shifts interjected with sheer rubberised panels. The designer, whose headquarters are still based in Dalston despite his global success and flagship West London store, brought something new and something old to the collection with unfinished knitwear and his signature fluoro lace. Christopher Kane plastic tags around necks and in hair brought a DIY edge to the collection.
Newcomer Roberta Einer’s eye-popping palette and use of textiles garnered attention at her off-schedule presentation. The recent graduate produced feminine slips and flared skirts in aquamarine and candy pink, incorporating eighties Americana motifs and soviet artwork into her illustrations, which were made out of hand-dyed beads and sequins.
Feminine shapes, whether reimagined or challenged, were evident across the board at fashion week. A vein of eighties nostalgia – bold colours and geometric shapes – was also a reoccurring theme and many designers acknowledged the craftsmanship of their work and that of the industry, by playing with finishings, fastenings and thread.
A fancy members’ club in Soho is a far cry from The Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick, so joining a select group for a preview of new E4 series Chewing Gum, adapted from a play first shown at the Yard, I felt a little out of my comfort zone.
“It’s like we’re royalty,” whispered someone, as we were led into a private cinema, free drinks in hand. That someone sounded not dissimilar to Micheala Coel, the series’ writer and star, who was due to answer questions afterwards.
Named one of the six best young playwrights in the UK by WhatsOnStage, Coel’s career began when she wrote and starred in a semi-autobiographical monologue called Chewing Gum Dreams that in 2013 became the Yard’s first play to be transferred to the National.
That play, about life on an East London estate, has been snapped up by E4 and has since morphed into a six-part coming-of-age comedy about a young woman who really should have come of age already.
“The play goes from extreme laughter to tears, but this is a comedy so I had to make a completely different show,” explains 26-year-old Coel.
In the play Coel’s character, Tracey Gordon, was a sharp-tongued 14-year-old living on an estate in Tower Hamlets with much charm and potential but few expectations. But the Tracey we meet in the series is now 24 and facing a different set of dilemmas.
Tracey’s religion is holding her back from gaining life experience; she lives in a strict Christian household with a sister whose idea of fun is to stay at home and play Ludo. Tracey seems to have missed out on the teenage kicks part of growing up – but is determined to make up for lost time.
A slightly embarrassed Coel describes the two episodes shown as “sex central”, an accurate enough description, though she later stresses that the show tackles the world of work, drugs, family life and relationships too.
As far as the sex goes though, there’s everything from a threesome to nose-licking, and a fair few other things besides. Tracey’s first port of call in her quest is to Google the word ‘sex’, but what she learns from the internet doesn’t stack up in the real world. “My face is not to be sat on,” her celibate boyfriend tells her brusquely, while her best friend Candice’s dating advice to “channel your inner slut”, proves similarly disastrous.
In a similar way to Lena Dunham’s Girls, sex is present as a fact of growing up rather than as something to titillate the viewer. In that programme, and in Chewing Gum too, the relationship between on screen characters and their real life equivalents isn’t exactly clear. Are Coel’s characters based on people she knows and, more pointedly, is Tracey based on her?
“I think everyone is made of a few people I know, including Tracey,” Coel tells journalists at the screening. “It could be if I was on a really long bus journey and somebody was on the phone that they’ve somehow been put into the mixing pot of every character.”
But when we speak later, Coel talks more about the parallels between herself and Tracey.
Chewing Gum is set on an estate in Tower Hamlets, similar to the one where Coel herself grew up.
The cast of Chewing Gum
“It was a strong mix of mainly immigrants,” she says of her upbringing. “Everyone was very poor and as much as our cultures clashed we were wonderfully united by economic circumstances.”
Then as a teenager, Coel, like Tracey, was “wrapped up in cotton wool”. Her mother, she says, was strict and wouldn’t always let her go out.
But instead of going down that well-trodden path of rebellion, Coel ended up devoting herself to the church. Becoming a devout Christian for her meant celibacy and “not talking to guys”, something many hormonal teenagers would never consider. Looking back on that time, Coel recognises that she “put growing up on pause” but on the plus side she sees a lot of positives for her development as an artist.
“I started performing pretty much when I became Christian. I had a big old Pentecostal conversion, was given a bible and I wrote a lot of poetry. I guess that kind of faith can make you do crazy things and that was pretty much the first crazy thing I did was I walked into a bar and I asked if I could read a poem.”
These days Coel is a writer who revels in lampooning religion and who is keen to talk about sex and promote ‘normal’ women’s body images on screen (apparently she wanted nudity in the show but it was vetoed). How did this outspoken writer emerge?
Coel describes her ‘second conversion’ after winning a scholarship to the Guildhall School for Music and Drama. Suddenly she found herself among a cohort of fellow performers who seemed happy without religion.
“I was learning from those people rather than trying to teach them anything. I’d been told all these things about ‘worldly’ people, then got to school and discovered they weren’t true. And also I didn’t really feel any need to tell people that they needed Jesus Christ because I didn’t think they did.”
Whilst her peers were doing their final year shows, Coel opted to go it alone and create her own piece, the 15-minute monologue that was the very first Chewing Gum Dreams. Then after graduating, Coel looked to put it on somewhere. She found the Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick, and applied to be part of their Theatre of Great Britain Festival.
“It was basically build your own set, do your own marketing and do your own producing,” Coel remembers. “So I went all around East London with flyers and Jay Miller who runs The Yard, he’s really amazing with scripts and was really helpful in the way I extended it. He really gave me strong bits of advice so I’m very thankful to him.”
After the rave reviews for Chewing Gum Dreams and a successful transfer to the Shed at the National Theatre, a series was commissioned. Coel had played a part in Top Boy, a very different Channel 4 series about East London estate life, but insists television was “never on my radar”. Clearly now that has changed, and Coel is currently shooting another E4 comedy drama, Aliens – from the producers of Misfits – in which she plays the lead character.
However, Coel certainly won’t turn her back on more stage work. “If the scripts are good then I’ll do the job and it doesn’t matter what kind of thing it is,” she says, sounding every inch like a drama school graduate.
Coel remembers the early days at the Yard, which may seem an age away but they were only three years ago. “I have extremely happy memories of performing there, as stressful as it was,” she says. “When you see people crying their eyes out or laughing and then looking like they’re satisfied. It’s the best, best, best feeling in the world.”
Good value local film festivals … Photograph: Let’s All be Free festival
The BFI London Film Festival is not the only show in town this month, as two locally based film festivals battle it out for a share of the limelight.
London Fields Free Film Festival
London Fields Free Film Festival returns for its second year with shorts, documentaries and features showing in venues across London Fields (23 October – 1 November).
The programme is centred around themes such as community, creativity, sexuality and mental illness, and with each event tailored to the venue – drag documentary Dressed as a Girl, for example, will be showing at London College of Fashion.
The ten-day festival closes over Halloween weekend, when The Bechdel Test Festival will host the intriguingly entitled Horror Hareem at Hackney Picturehouse, a weekend of horror films with women in lead roles.
Let’s All be Free
Another festival this month claims to “explore and celebrate what it means to be free”.
Let’s All Be Free Festival is at Motel Studio (16–18 October) and will include a selection of shorts, documentaries and ‘expression films’ from around the globe.
Highlights include the poetry film Borders by Elizabeth Mizon, about invasive virginity examinations given to migrating women from the Indian subcontinent in the 1970s.
There will also be spoken word artists, a panel discussion about the refugee crisis, and a Masterclass with Oscar winner Randolph Benson.
When I first moved to Hackney, I stumbled across an event in a crypt on a Sunday afternoon. It isn’t as creepy as it sounds. In fact, what I found there filled me with a slightly overwhelming sense of warm joy and joyful warmth. If that sounds like hyperbole, I can’t really admit that it is.
Acoustic Sundays are a bit like church services, but secular, chatty and fun – and with optional gin. Every month, a smorgasbord of up-and-coming musicians perform to an eclectic, friendly audience, fuelled by food and drink from local businesses.
The events are organised by SoundAdviceUK, a Hackney-based organisation that describes itself as “a music and media community that supports live music at no cost to the musicians”.
This Sunday’s line-up includes street musicians The Debt Collective, South London guitar band Eastern Barbers, the Laura Marling-inspired Lucy Evans and Diligent Indolent, a singer-songwriter who plays, in his words, “metal-inspired acoustic janglings”. The music starts at 2.30pm with an open mic session, with booked acts starting at 3.30pm until 8pm.
SoundAdviceUK is staffed by volunteers and unfunded, so all acts perform out of the goodness of their hearts but are rewarded by a professionally edited video of their performance.
The event is about “invigorating communities”, says Dominic Kasteel, co-director of Individio Media, the production company that runs SoundAdviceUK. Like most of us, Kasteel believes “happy communities are important” and says Acoustic Sundays aims to create an atmosphere “akin to a joyous Sunday afternoon in a rustic, Mediterranean-esque village square”.
Acoustic Sunday Circus is on Sunday 4th October 2015 from 2–8pm at St Peter’s Crypt, Northchurch Terrace, De Beauvoir, Hackney, N1 4DA. Entry is free.
As the major galleries gear up for their October openings, one art festival is hoping to steal their thunder this weekend that by championing the best emerging artists, galleries and projects in East and South London.
Art Licks Weekend is a three-day festival starting today in which young, independent galleries and spaces open to the public, with free events and exhibitions.
East London galleries such as Arebyte, Doomed and Transition are among those taking part in the festival, which is now in its third year, as well as less conventional gallery spaces in libraries, tube stations and people’s living rooms.
Art Licks was founded in 2013 by 28-year-old artist Holly Willats in response to a frustration that information about independent initiatives was not easily accessible to the public.
The free-of-charge grassroots festival hopes to highlight how the next generation of artists increasingly find themselves priced out of London, and how gallerists and artists in East and South London are finding creative ways to redress the balance.
This year Art Licks has confirmed 90 participating spaces with more than 300 artists working collectively – more than twice the size of the 2013 festival.
Art Licks Weekend is at various locations from 2–4 October. For the full programme see artlicksweekend.com
Rich Mix is no longer at risk of closing down after resolving its long-running financial dispute with Tower Hamlets Council.
The arts organisation has agreed to repay a £850,000 loan and, in turn, the council has handed over just under £1.6 million owed to Rich Mix under the terms of a planning agreement for a nearby development.
A statement agreed by Rich Mix and Tower Hamlet dated 25 September reads:
“Tower Hamlets Council and Rich Mix Cultural Foundation are pleased to announce that they have resolved the disputes between them and have brought an end to the legal proceedings currently in the High Court. The resolution of these disputes secures Rich Mix’s future and will benefit all of its stakeholders, users and the residents of Tower Hamlets.
“As part of the resolution, Rich Mix has received Section 106 monies agreed by the council’s Strategic Development Committee in August 2010 and has, in turn, agreed to repay the £850,000 loan given by the council to Rich Mix in 2003 and make a payment in respect of certain external costs.”
In an open letter, Rich Mix Chief Executive Jane Earl thanked the public for their “unfailing support”.
All smiles… Stik poses with a fan. Photograph: Russell Parton
People from as far afield as Manchester descended on Homerton yesterday in the hope of buying one of 100 original Stik prints, which the artist was selling to raise £50,000 for his local NHS hospital.
Some had camped out through the night and by midday the queue was snaking around the back of Homerton Hospital.
All proceeds from the sale were for the hospital’s neurological rehabilitation unit art room, to help expand the hospital’s arts workshop services for people with brain injuries and for those suffering from dementia.
The limited-edition prints were of a sleeping baby, a replica of a mural by Stik recently unveiled at the hospital.
Competition for the prints, which were on sale for £500 each, was so fierce that a queue member had introduced a raffle ticket system to stop people from jumping in.
“He’s one of us, a regular joe, a down-to-earth guy,” said Ali, from Hackney, who had been queuing since 7.30am, ten hours before the sale was due to start. “50 grand to give away like that, it’s really generous.”
Superstar status… Stik infront of a print of Sleeping Baby. Photograph: Russell Parton
When Stik arrived it was to the type of mobbing usually reserved for a superstar. Dressed in a leather jacket, shades and a t-shirt bearing one of his iconic stick man figures, he certainly looked liked one too.
Sean Caton, who has been Art Curator at Homerton Hospital for 20 years, said it was the most momentous day in the history of the hospital’s art department, and described Stik as “astonishingly generous” and a “true Renaissance man”.
“In my opinion it’s unprecedented and I think he’s a hero,” Mr Caton said.
“In this hospital there are many patients who need something to focus on, so we offer them art workshops, not just as a recreation or past time, but to help them gain control of their lives again.
“The things that go on in these workshops enhance their concentration, their motor coordination and their general sense of well being. And so the money raised will enable us to buy much needed equipment, materials and really push forward with these services.”
Those who missed out on a print were offered free posters of Sleeping Baby, printed in Pantone 300, or NHS blue.
“I want to show that we have been left holding the baby,” said Stik.
“We created the NHS, we love it and won’t let it be sold off.
“I want to encourage everybody at the Homerton Hospital to keep doing good work. This is my local and it’s kept me healthy and alive for a long time as it has done for lots of people in this area. The work people are doing here is incredibly important.”
Members of the cast of Rockston Stories: An Addictive Cabaret. Photograph: Siva Zagel
A cabaret about crack cocaine addiction performed by a cast including recovering addicts is coming to Hoxton Hall this month.
Rockston Stories: An Addictive Cabaret is a play about a cabaret singer who becomes addicted to crack, using the testimonies and stories of people researched locally.
The play is set in ‘Rockston’, apparently a reference to Hoxton’s nickname among crack cocaine users.
Told through the singer’s perspective, the play travels through time and space back to when Hoxton Hall was a music hall and temperance society meeting house.
The cast are nearly all in different stages of recovery from addiction, and the play includes some of their live testimonies, as well as characters from Hoxton’s historical past and present.
The production is by Outside Edge Theatre, a theatre company that produces work about addiction. It aims to help people affected by chemical addiction to achieve their potential by building skills and confidence.
Rehearsals for Rockston Stories. Photograph: Siva Zagel
Outside Edge was founded in 1998 by Phil Fox, an actor and former addict who died last year.
The play is dedicated to his memory, and devising it has made his successor Susie Miller realise that death and grieving are things most addicts are familiar with.
“We also had another cast member who passed away in April,” says Miller. “His actual words are in the script within the play, his final lines that he shared in our rehearsal are actually spoken. Grief is an everyday emotion because it’s a common occurrence for people in recovery to pass away.”
In the play the main character, Thalia, reaches ‘rock bottom’ and is faced with a decision.
“In terms of recovery they call it the jumping off point,” says Miller. “It’s the point where you either make a decision to change and step into recovery or often people will die through suicide or accidental death.”
Aside from the serious business of addiction, but as a cabaret Rockston Stories aims to entertain too. There are musical numbers with singers and instrumentalists, performing a mixture of classic songs and others written by cast members.
The cast ranges from professionals who have been in West End shows such as Cats and Les Miserables to amateurs, and Miller says this shows how addiction reaches all spectrums of society.
“Some have been in recovery for over 20 years, some just a few months, and some are professionally trained actors and directors and others have very little performance experience. It makes it very lively and vibrant to work with them.”
For painter Sean Worrall, the streets are the biggest gallery space of them all.
The Hackney-based artist is mid-way through a guerrilla art project called #365ArtDrops, in which specially-made paintings are ‘dropped’ around the borough and beyond, for members of the public to take home and tweet about.
Worrall plans to make and distribute 365 paintings in total during the course of this year. His rule is to use only found materials for the paintings, such as a piece of wood off the street, an unwanted canvas in a skip, or a piece of cardboard.
Each artwork is hung on the street in a carefully chosen location and labelled with the hashtag #ArtDrops365. Those who take the paintings are encouraged to use social media to document the project as it evolves.
“People look up the hashtag and put photographs on Twitter of them, to tell me where they are or who they are, and where it’s got to. That’s really important because I want to document it all in the end,” says Worrall.
Photograph: Sean Worrall
USA, Israel and Germany are among the final destinations of the paintings, even though each one has been dropped in London so far.
“I’ve got a great photo of a kid holding his ArtDrop by a sign in Oakland, California. I left that one in Hackney,” says Worrall.
The distinctive pieces, each one bearing Worrall’s leaf-heart tag, have been left all over London: outside shops, inside pubs, under railway bridges, on railings and on the top deck of buses.
Worrall spent three years running the Cultivate Vyner Street gallery, which closed last year and is now being developed into flats.
With ArtDrops, however, Worrall making work outside the traditional gallery setting, that allows the public to form part of the creative process. He hopes that by the end of the year he will have enough feedback to fill a book.
“It’s a real pleasure to pick things up off the street that people that people don’t want, or don’t have a use for anymore, and turn them into something people want.”
