Whirling dervish: Meshk Ensemble are to perform at the Barbican as part of the Transcender weekend
The Barbican’s Transcender weekend has become a firm favourite in London’s contemporary music events calendar over the past few years.
Returning next month for its eighth edition, the four-day concert series aims to explore the many different facets inherent to transcendental music from across the globe.
This year’s event features musicians from Morocco, France, UK, Iran, Turkey and the United States.
It will open at Milton Court Concert Hall with two contrasting performances.
The Master Musicians of Jajouka have been performing their unique folk music for generations, but first came to prominence in the West after much promotion from artists such as Brian Jones and Ornette Coleman.
The Master Musicians will be followed by Marouane Hajji, a vocalist from Fes, who performs devotional songs in the Sufi tradition.
The Moroccan theme is carried through into the second day – this time at LSO St Luke’s – with an exclusive collaboration between British electronic producer, James Holden, and Mâalem Houssam Guinia – a leading musician of the Gnawa music tradition.
This collaboration will be mirrored by another, that between Étienne Jaumet, Sonic Boom and Céline Wadier, all of whom will be paying a drone-induced tribute to American composer, La Monte Young.
Electronic music maestro: James Holden
Saturday will see the focus shift onto the Barbican Hall for a double bill that reflects on the different aspects of the Persian poet and scholar, Rumi.
The Iranian singer, Parisa, who last performed in London over ten years ago, will be bringing a fresh, lyrical approach to Rumi’s mystical poems.
Turkey’s Meshk Ensemble will follow suit with their ritualised interpretation of the sema ceremony, put to revived compositions from the Mevlevi repertoire. Directed by Timuçin Çevikoglu, this will be the ensemble’s UK debut.
The festival will close on Sunday night with a rare performance by Texan duo, Stars of the Lid. They will be combining their highly processed ambient tones with intricate lighting and animated projections.
Texan duo: Stars of the Lid
Speaking to Barbican’s Contemporary Music Programmer, Chris Sharp, I asked what he looked for when putting on an event as eclectic as Transcender. “The whole idea was to try and juxtapose different musical traditions and suggest that there are connections between them,” he said.
“For example, the common human impulse – to escape the everyday and move into a place where time slows down – has been central within religious music, going back hundreds of years, if not longer.
“A lot of contemporary music, from club-based electronic music to stoner rock, explores similar ideas around repetition and gradual change. We try and distribute our attention around the world. This year there is quite a lot of Moroccan music, which we haven’t done in the past.
“And at the same time, we’re looking for interesting collaborations between contemporary artists who have different approaches to music making.”
Transcender 29 September – 2 October Barbican Centre, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS barbican.org.uk
Sarah Yaseen of Rafiki Jazz. Photograph: Ayse Balko
A still from The Shore Break, one of the films to be screened at the Green Film Festival
Independent films that shine a light on global environmental issues are to be shown nationwide this month as part of the sixth annual UK Green Film Festival.
The Barbican is an official partner of the festival, and will be showing films throughout the first week of May that focus on “shifting the global narrative toward a sustainable future” and give insights into environmental problems in far-reaching corners of the globe.
This year’s selection includes Racing Extinction, an investigative documentary in which Oscar-winning director Louie Psihoyos infiltrates black markets to expose the hidden world of endangered species.
The Shore Break is the story of two cousins from South Africa’s Wild Coast who have differing plans to develop their land. While Nonhle wants to develop eco-tourism to protect the community’s traditional way of life, Madiba is planning a titanium mine and national tolled highway.
Also screening is the UK premiere of The Messenger, which chronicles the plight of songbirds worldwide to survive in turbulent environmental conditions brought about by humans.
Festival director Daniel Beck said: “The UK Green Film Festival has captivated and inspired ever increasing audiences and we are very pleased to witness that there’s a growing appetite for issue-based films.”
Green Film Festival Until 8 May Barbican Centre, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS barbican.org.uk
Strange and Familiar is an epic exhibition about Britain, in which photographers from around the world and from down the years offer a fresh eye to the look and feel our idiosyncratic island.
Martin Parr, the British documentary photographer and photojournalist, has curated a show spanning from the 1930s to the present day, giving an outsider’s view of people and places that might otherwise feel familiar.
London and its citizens feature heavily, as might be expected, but so do the cities of the north, the mining villages of Wales, and some of the most isolated and intriguing corners of the British Isles.
Britain being one of the centres of culture in the world throughout the 20th century, the list of photographers who have placed it under their lens unsurprisingly corresponds to some of the biggest names in the history of the medium.
Giants like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank are included here, but their work is placed alongside less well-known or more recently-lauded artists, informing and strengthening the impact of iconic images and often-imitated styles.
Edith Tudor Hart’s images, which appear alongside Cartier-Bresson’s, for example, offer a counterpart insight into 1930s Britain, seen through the eyes of an émigré Jewish woman. Her self-portrait with a random shopper in a market mirror was one of the first moments of stand-and-stare wonder in an exhibit of infinitely fascinating images.
As the exhibition moves forward through time, similar pairings evoke a sense of the feel of an era or moment. Robert Frank and Paul Strand’s 1950s explorations of London bankers, Welsh miners and the inhabitants of the Outer Hebrides acutely demonstrate the gulf in lives and society across the country at the time, and the difficulty of moving between them.
The importance of the changes in medium, and the technical advances that occur throughout the exhibition’s span are as equally present as the photographers. Noticing the shifting grain and quality of different artists’ preferred cameras and film stocks is a fascinating aspect of the experience of viewing so many images so closely together.
Key moments in photographers’ use of new technologies stand out, most vividly when Bruce Davidson’s mid-1960s photos of Welsh mining towns explode into hyper-real colour, the pink smoke staining the images of cobbled streets and grey stone houses. Frank Hablicht’s sexually charged images of the swinging 60s are playful and mobile, the camera peeking up and out to offer a flavour of the motion of the bright young things portrayed.
Raymond Depardon’s images of 1980s Glasgow contain some of the most striking uses of colour in the whole exhibition, the flames of burning rubbish glowing against a grimy background, or the harsh red of a car popping against slate grey housing. In the downstairs section of the gallery we are offered work that is further away from the conventions of portraiture, landscape and photojournalism, including the intricate scrapbooks of Shinro Ohtake, and Bruce Gilden’s contemporary extreme close-up grotesqueries.
The exhibition pans around the upstairs gallery and the ground floor corridor rooms, built around a central library space that gives visitors a wonderful opportunity to sit and leaf through the books that many of the photographs are drawn from. It’s an opportunity to handle the images, to inspect them in your hands rather than squint between shoulders at the wall. The break this offers may also be welcome, as the exhibition is enormous and warrants a leisurely visit to see it all.
Parr has created a huge and expansive survey of Britain, and done so in a way that might provide real insight into the funny place that many of us call home. Like the best survey exhibitions, different parts will appeal to different viewers, and you and I will each come away with our favourites and less-favourites. But more importantly this show is an excuse to wallow in beautiful documentary photography, in still images of everyday life and mundane strangeness, in the swim of history and the artistry of its documentation.
Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers Until 19 June Barbican Art Gallery Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS Facebook event
Letting the side down: Polish film director Jerzy Skolimowski, whose films feature at this month’s Kinoteka Polish Film Festival
The Kinoteka Film Festival gets underway this month, with East London venues set to screen work by some of Poland’s most renowned filmmakers.
A retrospective of the films of Jerzy Skolimowski will be held at the Barbican.
Skolimowski is a maverick filmmaker who has worked as a director, writer and actor for over 50 years, and is regarded as one of Polish cinema’s most iconic figures.
For the opening gala on 7 April, Skolimowski will be there in person to introduce his new film 11 Minutes, which focuses on 11 minutes in the lives of a variety of characters whose paths cross as they race towards an unexpected finale.
The film, described as an “inventive metaphor for our modern hectic lives driven by blind chance”, will be followed by an onstage question and answer session with the director.
Over the month the Barbican will be showing more films from Skolimowski’s extensive back catalogue, including rarely screened titles such as 1960s psychological drama Barrier (with an introduction by Skolimowski), Deep End, a comedy-drama about obsession, and the 1982 film Moonlighting starring Jeremy Irons, which was awarded Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival.
The Shoreditch-based Close-Up Cinema will be hosting festival films too, as part of their Masters of Polish Cinema season. These include a screening of Skolimowski’s loose trilogy featuring his on-screen alter ego Andrzej Leszczyc: the films Identification Marks: None, Walkover and Hands Up!
The boutique cinema is also planning to show three early psychological thrillers by Roman Polanski: his Skolimowski-scripted debut Knife in the Water; the controversial, mind-bending exploration of psychosis, Repulsion; and the paranoiac ménage-à-trois Cul-de-sac.
Then later in the month the cinema will show Pawel Pawlikowski’s debut feature, Ida, the Oscar-winning film that delves through 20th century Polish history, scripted by East London resident Rebecca Lenkiewicz.
Mime is by definition the ‘quiet man’ of the theatrical arts, but each year the London International Mime Festival sets out to showcase sophisticated and cutting-edge forms of visual theatre that are worth shouting about.
This month world-renowned acts from across the globe will have their sights trained on London, with the Barbican one of the host venues.
Charades this certainly is not. Ball-bearings spin and pendulums swing in Expiry Date, by Belgian company BabaFish (19–23 January), while four performers give an ephemeral retrospective of one man’s life, whose memories are conveyed through an unpredictable mix of acting, juggling, movement and singing.
Monteverdi’s operatic take on the legend of Ulysses, and Primo Levi’s Second World War refugee memoir The Truce, are starting points for The Return (27–31 January), a production by Australian company Circa that explores states of exile, fusing singing and music with the physicality of contemporary circus.
String marionettes, operated by the German puppeteers of Figurentheater Tűbingen, make reference to art, science and nature in Wunderkammer (2–6 February), while in Dark Circus by Stereoptik, two French visual artists bring paper, ink, sand and silhouettes to life, drawing and playing music, with their creations projected onto a large screen (26–30 January).
French artist Yoann Bourgeois has a fascination with weightlessness and suspension. For his production He Who Falls, six performers react with agility when a suspended podium begins to pivot, swing and elevate, with each scenario choreographed to music.
The London International Mime Festival dates from 1977 and is the longest running event of its type in the world.
Rodrigo Felha’s Favela Gay, Genesis Cinema, 26 November
Queer film and arts festival Fringe! returns this month, with screenings, talks, panels, workshops, performances and parties taking place in 14 venues across East London from 24–29 November.
This year sees the festival branch out to the Barbican and Genesis Cinema, and there’s a distinctly international flavour to programme, with representation from more than 20 countries and a special focus on Brazil.
Documentary Favela Gay, directed by Rodrigo Felha, looks at queer life in the slums of Rio de Janeiro (26 November), while Gustavo Vinagre’s hybrid documentary Nova Dubai explores sex, urban spaces and gentrification (28 November).
Other highlights include Eisenstein in Guanajuato, Peter Greenway’s camp and provocative biopic of filmmaker Segei Eisenstein’s trip to Mexico in 1931 (24 November), the Lithuanian Oscar-nominated Summer of Sangaile, a coming-of-age story of two young girls (25 November), and the documentary The New Black, which follows activists, families and clergy on both sides of the campaign to legalise same-sex marriage in Maryland, USA (27 November).
From its humble beginnings five years ago, Fringe! has blossomed into one of London’s premier queer arts festivals.
Organisers are promising a packed programme of thought-provoking new work from across the globe, and to complement the films expect a series of talks on issues such as LGBT immigration, workshops about spanking and shibari, and live performances from the likes of Portuguese ‘post-porn’ collective Quimera Rosa.
In a small screen at the back of the Whitechapel Gallery, a group of keen cinephiles awaits the address of Jem Cohen, a veteran New York-based filmmaker who has made more than 70 idiosyncratic works over three fruitful decades on the job. It’s an early part of a two-month retrospective entitled Compass and Magnet, with events also taking place at the Barbican and Hackney Picturehouse.
Cohen has produced diary films, city portraits, essay films and collaborated with an extraordinary list of musicians – crossing and blending disciplines with pioneering spirit. On this occasion he’s introducing Museum Hours, perhaps his most accessible and well-known work to date.
“You can walk into a museum and in its way it can miss,” he tells us. “Something has to come together, things have to meet…”
And they do. The film is a subtle and moving expression of enormous ambition. Ideas about time, image, memory, art, artefact, displacement, friendship, experience, history and much more, are hung on a sweet narrative thread that runs through the corridors of the Kunsthistorisches Museum and out into the streets of Vienna.
The following evening, Cohen takes leave of an East End pub to chat for an hour. He tells me more about the film: “It refuses to follow certain rules about what a narrative is and how a narrative is supposed to function, and it insists that the environment, the locations, the ideas and the characters are all equally important.”
This kind of approach is indicative of Cohen’s dedication to making films that don’t lock into one specific form; Museum Hours is particularly interesting in this regard.
Arriving in an unfamiliar city to tend the bedside of a dying cousin, Anne (Mary Margaret O’Hara) is comforted by a chance meeting with a kind museum attendant (Bobby Sommer). One would be forgiven for expecting a romance, but as the lure of familiar storytelling takes hold, Cohen quickly pulls it away and the piece shatters into something far more interesting: a strange hybrid of documentary and fiction that’s both affecting and real.
Those familiar with Cohen’s wider body of work will recognise the importance of music, which is heavily hinted at in the casting of musician O’Hara, whose character sings quietly but crucially.
Jem Cohen filming Museum Hours in Vienna. Photograph: Mark
“Music has always been absolutely vital to me since I was a little kid, but I’m not a musician so I had to find other ways to get at musical experience,” he says. “I’m often inspired as much by music, painting or poetry as I am by other cinema, but I also think it’s something that film can aspire to – it can be a kind of music.”
He goes on: “It’s something that’s woven into our lives – it doesn’t have to be something that only celebrities get to do. There are a lot of people who sing in their kitchens and might sing very beautifully, but we’ll never get to hear them. It’s the act of doing it that might help them to be in the world, and I think that’s very much what’s happening with Mary’s character in the film.”
This elevation of the finer details permeates much of Cohen’s work and is a particularly key element of his observations of the city – whichever city that may be.
“I just feel strongly that there is always a city that is entirely separate from the one tourists are led to, and that goes for any city,” he says. “In terms of Vienna, I was just reflecting my experience, going on random walks and tube rides, or opening the door of an unknown bar and stumbling onto one of the film’s most important locations.”
Raised first in Kabul and then Washington DC, Cohen moved to New York in the mid-80s, “when it was just at the tail end of a very rough period”, he explains. “It’s problematic to romanticise a city that is in rough shape in terms of crime and infrastructure falling apart. But there was a sense of mystery and possibility that had to do with people of all kinds going to New York to be able to have some freedom.”
He continues: “It’s kind of a great dark magnet throughout history where people could get away from parochial, predictable circumstances and enter into this sort of wild place.”
He then draws a comparison between the rise of real estate in New York and the current property crisis in London. But he is quick to stress the resilience of cities like these – both of which he is very fond.
Jem Cohen filming Museum Hours. Photograph: Paolo
“New York, when I ride the subway, is still an incredible mix of people and that’s what makes it an interesting place above all. And I feel the same way about London. I don’t see that they are really going to able to scrub New York and London entirely clean, but god damn they will try.”
There is passion and sensitivity in almost everything Cohen says, and he delivers his thoughts with care and precision. With this in mind, it seemed strange that the Guardian should describe him as somebody who categorically “hates indie films”.
“I don’t hate indie films,” he says. “‘Indie’ is just one of those words that has become sort of meaningless – it’s not about something that one needs to hate, it’s more about it not meaning anything. It’s like using the word ‘alternative’ in regard to music – it just doesn’t have any particular concrete value anymore to say that.”
And what if people want to call his films indie? “My filmmaking is done as far from commercial Hollywood as possible, but I haven’t been part of the Sundance world either. So by some standards I’m kind of invisible. But if you keep at it for 25, 30 years and make 70 films, sooner or later people realise you’re there. I don’t really care that much what people call it – if they need to call it indie then that’s not a big deal.”
And finally, I ask, why call the season Compass and Magnet?
“The main reason is that it amused me because I’m lost all the time,” he says. “For someone who travels a lot and films all the time, it’s just kind of funny and absurd that I am so poor with directions. And magnet of course is just because the basic premise of doing one’s work is to find out what things in the world call out and what things one is attracted to – what things stick.”
Smart cookie: Andy Warhol’s cookie jar collection. Image courtesy of the Movado Group
Artists are, perhaps unsurprisingly, particularly partial to objects. That is the key idea behind the Barbican Art Gallery’s new exhibition, which displays the personal collections of Damien Hirst, Hannah Darboven, Rae White, Sol LeWitt and others, interspersed with occasional examples of the artists’ own work. These are the objects that inspire their art, that are displayed in their homes and studios, and that give them pleasure.
The exhibition bursts with all kinds of cheap, expensive, big, colourful, tiny, old, new and drab things, from records to masks, signs and stamps. It is a reminder that art rarely comes from a deep centre of genius or spontaneously from nothing, but more often from an exploration of aesthetic inspirations and from personal iconographies built up over time.
It is a display of deeply personal objects, often suggesting an obsessive need to accrue more and more variations on a theme, such as Martin Parr’s Soviet space dog memorabilia or Andy Warhol’s famous collection of cookie jars. At points the exhibition resembles the best junk shop ever, and no doubt each visitor will pick out their own favourites. I was unavoidably drawn to the vinyl collection of artist Dr Lakra, the display of which features the covers of the best kinds of thrift store records; Nostalguitar!, Sounds from Exotic Island and more.
Dr Lakra’s collection of album covers. Photograph: Dr Lakra
These covers fill a wall alongside the artist’s Mexicalia and tattoo-infused sketchbooks, with select tracks blaring out through the gallery. Like a junk shop though, the quantity of the objects is occasionally more impressive than the objects themselves, and what might appear a treasure trove of infinitely-exciting ornaments is, on closer inspection, a set of things that are individually tatty and kitsch. But perhaps that is at least partly the point, as these are objects of personal significance rather than explicitly artistic endeavours.
One recurring problem with the Barbican Art Gallery exhibitions is their size, and it does feel as though Magnificent Obsessions is one or two rooms too large. Fatigue sets in, especially with such a dense collection of objects. Of course though, any exhibition like this is essentially a collection of collections, with things brought together by one artist now put together with more by a curator. It’s a difficult proposition for a gallery to reconcile these different elements, and to do so in a way that maintains the pace. Moving through the gallery it can be difficult to tell where the collections meet, and the edges of the show are indistinct.
Eye opener: Prosethic eyes from collection of Hiroshi Sugimoto
Piles of packing crates are heaped in one corner of the ground floor, and whilst it’s quite a nice stylistic touch (showing the process of bringing the collections together) I did briefly wonder if they just hadn’t been packed away. But on the upper floor where these packing crates are used as a plinth on which to display some of Peter Blake’s objects, the ‘fragile’ warning stickers highlight that, although some of these objects aren’t the ‘art’ of the artist, they are equally as precious.
Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector is at Barbican Art Gallery, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS until 25 May barbican.org.uk
Mezzo-Soprano Lore Lixenberg. Photograph: Mahogany Opera Group
A Stoke Newington singer will star in the world’s first ‘mindfulness opera’ this September at the Barbican, which is to feature yoga, communal eating and even washing up.
Mezzo-soprano Lore Lixenberg and seven musicians are to perform Lost in Thought, a four-hour opera for voices, instruments and audience based on the structure of an extended meditation.
Audience members are to work alongside the performers to create an “inner journey of mindfulness” through periods of meditation, rest, communal eating and yoga.
One of the most crucial parts is the washing up section, which develops into a communal performance by using a rhythm that occurs throughout the rest of the piece.
Composer Rolf Hind thought of the concept and composed the music for Lost in Thought, which is based on Buddhism.
Hind’s idea is to provide an antidote to the ‘critical mind’ that audiences bring to concerts and challenge traditional boundaries between audience and performers.
Artistic Director of Mahogany Opera Group and director of Lost in Thought, Frederic Wake-Walker, added that opera not only grapples with the desire to sing, dance, ritualise and tell stories, but can also “express most relevantly our multi-media, multi-cultural existence today”.
Stab in the dark: Light by Theatre Ad Infinitum. Photograph: Alex Brenner
The curtain’s up on the London International Mime Festival this month, with a season of physical and dance-theatre that aims to leave viewers – like the performers – at a loss for words.
East London audiences can look forward to the premiere of Light at the Barbican, inspired by Edward Snowden’s revelations and the ensuing debate on state surveillance. Fusing anime-style storytelling and a layered soundscape, it depicts an Orwellian future where a totalitarian regime uses implants and cyberspace to infiltrate its citizens’ minds.
At the dance end of the festival’s programming is Olivier Award nominee Aurelien Bory’s new work Plexus, showing at Sadler’s Wells, as well as 32 rue Vandenbranden by Belgian company Peeping Tom, a piece of dance-theatre at the Barbican in which six performers portray a small mountain community in a foreboding world of cold, wind and ice.
Also appearing at the Barbican is American puppeteer Basil Twist, part of the creative team for Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn concerts, whose new work is Dogugaeshi, inspired by the Japanese art of creating illusions through perspective.
