The art world today is so vast that it’s impossible for any one individual to have a complete understanding of everything that’s going on at one moment,” says the gallerist Iavor Lubomirov.
Lubomirov is director of Lubomirov/Angus-Hughes in Lower Clapton, which describes itself as a “charitable venue for curators” rather than a traditional gallery.
“Commercial galleries tend to have a stable of artists they show regularly big institutions are usually looking retrospectively at artists careers, so that puts us in a unique position,” he says.
Shadow Optics is the gallery’s latest venture into curation. It brings together four relatively unknown artists and is curated by CJ Mahony, a sculptor who runs an archaeological project space in Cambridge.
“She’s interested in things that have a sense of delicacy about them so as if they’re about to fall apart, barely holding together, and she’s also interested in light (which is fairly common among artists anyway). It’s these two themes she’s trying to bring together in this show.”
Among the artists featuring in the exhibition is Solveig Settemsdal, whose work exists in a hinterland between drawing, sculpture and photography. She uses materials that are easily affected by their surroundings – giving sculpture an almost liquid quality.
“I think if you at Solveig’s photos they’re fascinating because you have no idea how they’re created or what they are but there’s a sense of things floating in outer space or underwater,” says Lubomirov.
“It could be like an atomic explosion it could be an organic animal or an alien – whatever it is it looks like it’s about to float away and you’ve caught it at this precious moment of existence.”
The group show also includes work by Georgie Grace, whose videos look into technological change and our tolerance for flickering light.
A still from Georgie Grace’s Shedding.
And Reece Jones makes drawings that start off whimsical but which undergo repeated application and removal until they evolve into a finished image that is difficult to define.
“Of course the thing is these are artists who are not represented by our gallery or who are necessarily going to be seen together again, Lubomirov says.
“It is a moment that will come and then disappear.”
A female journalist who disguised herself as a soldier and travelled to the front on a bicycle during the First World War is the inspiration for a film premiering next month at Hackney Picturehouse.
Blue Pen focuses on ten women journalists whose voices have been silenced through censorship, confinement in institutions and abuse.
Although largely set in the present day, the film’s title refers to the wartime government’s practice of censoring letters and reports from the front.
“I was considering the number of women journalists who are disappeared and executed to this day,” says Julie McNamara, the artistic director of Hackney-based theatre company Vital Xposure.
“So we began to make an experimental short film looking at censorship and blue pen, and Dorothy Lawrence’s story was the springboard.”
When the war broke out, Dorothy Lawrence was 19-year-old aspiring journalist brought up in the care of the church by a guardian whom she later claimed had raped her.
Although very few journalists were allowed to the front Lawrence felt she had every right to report on the war, and – in the era of the suffragettes – believed there was nothing a woman couldn’t do.
“She got the boat to Calais, bought a bicycle and then cycled to the front line,” says McNamara.
“Everyone she met along the way thought it was a jolly jape and that she’d never make it.”
Arrested by French police two miles short of the front line, she was ordered to turn back. Then in Paris she befriended a group of soldiers in a café. She persuaded them to smuggle her a uniform piece by piece and teach her how to march.
Lawrence arrived at the front in perfect disguise and enlisted under the name Sapper (Private) Dennis Smith. But two weeks later a young soldier wanting to earn his stripes “dobbed her in it”.
“All hell was let loose. She was investigated and of course they suspected she was a spy. Then they thought she was a ‘camp follower’, the term they used for legalised prostitutes working on the front line.”
The silencing of Dorothy Lawrence took various forms. Her writings were heavily censored, to the extent that she was never taken seriously. She was also threatened with court martial (even though women couldn’t serve in the armed forces) and placed in a nunnery in France, before being escorted back to Britain.
By 1925, Lawrence’s dreams of Fleet Street looked increasingly remote. Her heavily censored book Sapper Dorothy Lawrence: The Only English Woman Soldier flopped commercially, and after confiding to a doctor that her church guardian has raped her she was taken into care and later deemed insane.
She was committed first to the London County Mental Hospital and then institutionalised at the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in Friern Barnet. She died at Friern Hospital in 1964 and was buried in a pauper’s grave in New Southgate Cemetery.
“Blue Pen is more an art film than anything else and is not a dramatic film,” says McNamara.
“It begins with truth of Dorothy Lawrence’s story and creates in the audience’s mind an atmosphere of Dorothy Lawrence’s interrogation and what became of her.
“It then moves on to give ten names from the last decade who have each been disappeared, the majority executed, and so the final question you’re left with is: what is it with the dangerousness of women telling the truth?”
Alongside the premiere of Blue Pen, the launch will also include a screening of Emma Humphreys the Legacy, a documentary short about a teenage sex worker who spent ten years behind bars for killing her boyfriend and pimp, whose case eventually changed the law for those in abusive relationships who kill.
There will also be a panel discussion and live music from Lorraine Jordan, a singer-songwriter who wrote Anna’s Song, a tribute to assassinated Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
Blue Pen launch event 6 September The Attic, Hackney Picturehouse 270 Mare Street E8 1HE picturehouses.com
Exposure: East London has historic links to air pollution. Photograph: David Holt
Air pollution at 66 Tower Hamlets primary schools breached EU limits for nitrogen dioxide in 2010, a report published earlier this year revealed.
Setting out figures for each London borough, it found that deprived parts of the city, such as Tower Hamlets and Hackney, suffer greater exposure to air pollution than richer neighbouring boroughs.
Looking back to Victorian times, with East London the centre of heavy industry and the greatest concentration of slums, one might say it was forever thus. But back then, and until the early 1960s, air pollution in the form of fog was a more visible and pervading presence in the lives of Londoners.
Dr Christine Corton of Wolfson College, Cambridge, is the author of London Fog –The Biography.
“The wind direction in London tends to be from west to east, so the East End had a lot of industry puffing out smoke and houses that used open fires. But it was also getting the smoke from the West End because of the wind direction,” she says.
Corton tells me how London’s fogs changed the very nature of city life, creating worlds of anonymity and providing cover for crime.
“The East End was very much seen as the dark continent,” Corton says.
“It was much easier to pick a pocket back then. There’s stories of ladders being put up the side of buildings, and burglars making their way up, stealing whatever is inside and escaping without being seen.”
Fictional depictions of events such as the Jack the Ripper murders always seem to be shrouded in fog, even though none of the murders took place on a foggy night.
“Film productions of Sherlock Holmes generally open with a fog,” Corton says. “It’s an immediate signifier of a murky crime-ridden scene, but in fact there wasn’t that much urban fog in Conan Doyle’s books.”
The fog was a versatile metaphor for writers, appearing in the works of T.S. Eliot, Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens as well as in paintings by Whistler and Monet.
“Dickens uses it in Bleak House for the obfuscation of the law and it pervades the whole of the first chapter where everyone is in a fog. And in Our Mutual Friend, he uses it to show people’s character, so the villain Fledgley comes out into fog and the fog sucks him in – it’s like he’s part of that corruption that’s created by society.”
The fog’s various nicknames – ‘London Particular’ or ‘pea-souper’ – prove that it captured the general public’s imagination too.
Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and other industrial cities also had smoke problems, but only in London did residents actually feel quite proud of the fog. A smoky street was a sign that industry was booming and that people could afford coal on their fire – which through most of 19th century was most people’s only source of heat and light.
“Whenever I talk to people who remember the 1950s fog there’s also nostalgia that somehow the London Fog created a warm reassuring environment,” Corton says.
“The smell, although sulphurous, felt somehow nutritious, which is why fog is often talked about in food terms.
“And there are also stories of lovers who couldn’t see each other in their own homes meeting in the fog on a bench holding hands or kissing. So it could actually create this almost domestic space for them.”
This ambivalence towards the fog contributed to its staying power. Corton says that, starting from the 1820s, unsuccessful attempts were made every decade to clean up London’s air.
“Although people detested the fog and knew it killed them they thought it represented something very special about London. And it was partly because of that the legislation passed was always weakened.”
The smog of 1952 was the real catalyst for change. Labelled the Big Smoke, this severe air-pollution event lasted five days and was the cause of 12,000 premature deaths, according to a recent study.
“People had just fought a World War and I think they said we didn’t fight a World War in order to kill ourselves with the air we breathe,” Corton says.
The fog began to dissipate after the 1956 Clean Air Act was passed, introduced as a private members’ bill by the Enoch Powell-supporting Conservative MP, Gerald Nabarro.
It was strengthened in 1968 by another Act of Parliament, this time sponsored by Robert Maxwell.
But whilst the fog might be a very distant memory to some, air pollution in East London today is a present – though less visible – threat to public health.
“They reckon now that 9,000 people die every year from London air pollution,” says Corton.
“For 150 years at least, people knew the air they were breathing was bad for them. I would take that and say let’s look at the automobile, which we now are so in love with that we can’t envisage using all the time. In a way it’s a parallel to our love of the coal fire.
“It hasn’t entered the artistic imagination as the yellowy green smog of yesteryear, but it’s a situation that fundamentally hasn’t changed. Only today it’s just a different type of air pollution.”
London Fog – The Biography is published by Harvard University Press. ISBN: 9780674088351. RRP: £22.95
East London Suffragette: Sylvia Pankhurst. Photograph: Roman Road Trust
A statue of Sylvia Pankhurst could soon take pride of place on Roman Road.
Plans are in place to erect a statue in Bow of the radical feminist who founded the East London Federation of Suffragettes in 1913.
The Roman Road Trust, a community development organisation, wants the Pankhurst statue to be located on the junction of St Stephen’s Road and Roman Road.
It would form part of a wider public art trail focused on East End women such as Annie Besant, who played a prominent role in the Bow matchgirls strike of 1888.
“A lot of people don’t realise that Bow is the heartland of Sylvia Pankhurst,” said Tabitha Stapely, CEO of the Roman Road Trust.
“Due to the bombing in the war and various council initiatives to tidy up the area afterwards, there are no buildings or sites left of where Sylvia worked on Roman Road.”
“We want people to know the history, feel part of it and engage with it. So all these things have been leading up to the idea of celebrating her work with a statue.”
Radical speaker: Sylvia Pankhurst outside the headquarters of the East London Federation of Suffragettes in Old Ford Road, Bow. Photograph: Roman Road Trust
But a statue is only the start of the Trust’s ambitious plans to celebrate Bow’s heritage.
“What we want to do is even bigger,” Stapely said. “Bow was an area that was very very deprived 110 years ago, but it attracted a lot of amazing visionary women. What we’d like is to see them all celebrated.”
The statue and art trail is part of the Roman Road Neighbourhood plan, a legal document that sets out planning policies for a given area, written by its residents and businesses.
Although other campaigns for statues – such as those for Mary Wollstonecraft or Mary Seacole – have rumbled on for years, Stapley is optimistic a Pankhurst statue and art trail will be a reality in four years’ time.
“We already have a lot of ducks in a row, we’ve got backing from key Tower Hamlets councillors, and we have a good working relationship with Poplar Harca who own a lot of the land around Bow Road,” said Stapely.
Councillor Josh Peck, Cabinet Member for Work and Economic Growth, has already thrown his support behind the campaign. “Bow was the centre of Sylvia Pankhurst’s campaigning but our area’s role has largely been lost to history. It’s time we properly commemorated her work here,” he said.
Some of the many Bow landmarks in the history of the women’s suffrage movement in East London include the former site of Roman Road Baths, where Pankhurst used to hold meetings of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), as well as Arbers on Roman Road, the printing works that published Sylvia Pankhurst’s feminist newspaper Woman’s Dreadnought.
Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst are commemorated with a statue and plaque by Victoria Tower Gardens, but no such honour has previously been afforded Sylvia, who opposed her family over the First World War and commitment to socialism.
Another statue of Sylvia Pankhurst is planned for Clerkenwell Green in Islington in time for the centenary of the Representation of the People Act in 1918, which gave the vote to some women.
Reclusive: Matthew Needham is Greenwood in Stutterer
East London may with some justification be able to call itself a world leader when it comes to making short films these days.
That is because East London films have triumphed for two years running at the Oscars in the category of Best Live Action Short Film, arguably the most prestigious award a short film can receive.
This year 12-minute short Stutterer emerged victorious in the category, emulating the success of James Lucas’s The Phone Call the previous year.
Directed by Benjamin Cleary, the film is about a reclusive typographer with a severe speech impediment whose inability to communicate effectively in everyday situations severely hampers his self-esteem.
Greenwood, played by Ben Whishaw-lookalike Matthew Needham, is a young twenty-something East Londoner who can’t even phone his broadband provider without them assuming it’s a nuisance call and hanging up.
When someone asks him for directions, he feigns deafness by responding in sign language to avoid a potentially embarrassing situation.
Yet the voice inside his head is clear, articulate and witty. He makes up poetry, his bedroom is full of books.
The place where Greenwood can most be himself is on the internet, where he has been chatting with a girl for six months over Facebook. But when she decides to visit London and wants to meet up IRL, Greenwood is crippled by fear.
With funky patterned shirts buttoned all the way to the top, Greenwood looks every inch the modern East Londoner as he scouts Broadway Market, rehearsing what he’s going to say, leading to the final scene outside the Star By Hackney Downs pub, and a clever and unexpected plot twist.
Only the viewer is privy to Greenwood’s inner thoughts and wry observations, which we hear in a voiceover, often while Needham’s face, the picture of self-pity, gazes back at us.
But our sympathy is derived less from Greenwood’s condition than what it comes to represent: the struggle to bridge the gap between the ‘real’ person inside and the one the world sees – a universal theme no less, in this subtle and tender film.
Changing times: the Rio Cinema. Photograph: Chris Evans
Staff at the Rio Cinema in Dalston are to strike over low rates of pay and compulsory redundancies.
In a ballot that took place on Wednesday (11 May), cinema workers voted to take industrial action, with the walk out set to take place on 25 May.
Employees are seething over the cinema’s reluctance to pay the London Living Wage (LLW) – currently set at £9.40 an hour – a figure regarded as the basic cost of living in the capital.
Last month Rio Cinema announced a restructure that offers higher wages but which cuts hours and staff to pay for it.
The disgruntled workers have launched the SOS Rio campaign, and an online petition has attracted 2250 supporters, including the likes of Hackney director Asif Kapadia and the actor Zawe Ashton.
The Rio employs 30 members of staff, many of whom work on a part-time or casual basis.
Two thirds of the cinema’s staff are in BECTU, the media and entertainment trade union.
In the ballot on Wednesday, 13 employees voted in favour of strike action, with seventy per cent of BECTU members casting their vote.
The strikers’ demands include a pay rise for all staff and commitment to the LLW, the withdrawal of the cinema’s restructure and threat of compulsory redundancies, as well as a “detailed five-year plan from the Board on how they intend to grow the cinema as a community resource for low income families”.
“What started out as a simple pay dispute has turned into a passionate ideological battle over the soul of one of the last community cinemas in London,” said Sofie Mason, national official of BECTU.
“Staff want change but not change that rips the heart out of the Rio.”
Rio cinema Executive Director Oliver Meek said he was “at a loss” over the planned strike.
“I’m incredibly frustrated by this,” Mr Meek said. “I’ve already confirmed with staff that the vast majority would go from the minimum wage, which is currently £7.40, to 12.5 per cent above that to £8.10 an hour.
”It’s not the London Living Wage, and whilst I agree we should be paying the London Living Wage, we can’t do that when the cinema is not financial viable.
“The salary I’m proposing is more than many other independent cinemas pay, and this is really a first step.”
Mr Meek, who became the cinema’s Executive Director last year, has hatched a “regeneration plan” for the Rio, which would add a second screen and make the ailing business more sustainable.
“If we had a second screen we’d be able to pay the London Living Wage – which is what we should be doing,” he said.
“But effectively I’ve taken on a cinema that’s been failing for a decade so I’m not able to do so at this point,” he said.
Long-running dispute
The long-running dispute over pay dates back to 2013, when the Rio Board announced the cinema was close to going under.
Staff agreed a pay cut of 10 per cent over seven months, which along with public donations saved the cinema.
Then in October 2015 staff asked for a pay rise for all employees, as well as repayment of the 10 per cent wage cut from 2013.
But all the cinema bosses offered was a wage increase to £8.10 for the lowest paid, which led to the collapse of talks in March.
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
Michael (Sebastian Armesto) and Kristen (Sophia Dawnay) share a moment in Dead Cat
There was a time when brash romantic comedies ruled the cinema screens. But now, with the likes of Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary more than a decade old, it is a genre in decline.
But Sam Bern is trying to restore the rom-com to its former heights.
The Homerton-based filmmaker has just released his debut feature Dead Cat, about two childhood sweethearts who chance upon each other at the start of their thirties.
“Romcoms are important films and I think are really underrated,” says 34-year-old Bern, who lives in Homerton.
“At their heart they’re about two people who at the moment aren’t happy or aren’t functioning and it’s finding a way for them to be complete or happy again.”
Dead Cat is the story of Michael and Kristen, who have taken very different paths in life since they last knew each other.
“She’s sort of gone off and done everything and he’s sort of gone off and done nothing,” explains Bern.
“She’s got married, had a career and a kid and is going through a divorce, and he’s tried to become a photographer but it hasn’t quite been working.
“They run into each other at speed dating night so it’s like he sits down at a table and realises the person opposite him is someone he was very close to when he was a teenager, and they sort of come back into each others lives.”
With only a bunch of dysfunctional friends as allies, Michael and Kristen seek to discover whether this second bite of the romantic cherry is anything more than mere nostalgia.
The dead cat of the title is originally Michael’s hapless excuse for following Kristen around.
Much of the film is shot around Shoreditch, where Bern and the production team used to work making corporate films and music videos until the financial crisis hit.
“We were losing a lot of work so, as a group of filmmakers who had collaborated a lot before, we decided to make a feature film with people that we knew.”
Since starting work on the film in 2009, some of the cast have already made names for themselves: Sebastian Armesto was the lead in Star Wars 7 and Tom Mison has made a name for himself in the Fox series Sleepy Hollow.
“We all trained together at drama school and that’s how we knew each other,” Bern says.
Romantic comedies at their best are life-affirming, and at their worst can feel formulaic and cliché-ridden. The idea of there being a person out there who is ‘the one’ is a tired trope, Bern insists.
“It’s not that they have to be together it’s that they would be good together,” he says, explaining that each of the main characters provides the spark missing in the life of the other.
“He needs more real world and she needs more escapism and they sort of begin to find it in each other.”
“It’s like a mini resurrection you get to see these people get a second chance and find something in themselves that maybe they didn’t realise was there before.”
Generation sex – The Wardrobe Company on stage. Photograph: Jack Offord
Sex began in 1963, said Philip Larkin. But in a play at Shoreditch Town Hall it’s the seventies providing fertile ground for sexual awakening.
In 1972: The Future of Sex by The Wardrobe Ensemble three couples embark on having sex for the first time during one evening.
This is the year when Ziggy Stardust first appeared on Top of the Pops, when Lady Chatterley’s Lover was finally published unabridged, and when the notorious pornographic film Deepthroat was released.
“Our research led us to that moment because it seemed quite significant time in British public consciousness in terms of the changing of attitudes about gender and sexuality,” says the play’s director Tom Brennan.
“We were looking to make a show about sex and sexual anxiety and our discussions led us to that moment in time between the AIDS epidemic and the sexual revolution.”
In this era of glam rock and space-hoppers, Christine is steeling herself for the loss of her virginity with the nerdy lead singer of a local band, whilst other storylines involve a student who is inspired by her university professor in more ways than one, and Brian in his bedroom, exploring his sexual identity by himself.
“The storylines are kind of woven together – we’ve structured it so we have a lot of narration in the show which allows us to jump between the storylines and kind of explore them simultaneously in some cases,” Brennan explains.
The show features original music from Bristol-based songwriter Tom Crosley-Thorne, a school friend of Brennan.
“I was in a band with him and when I was first talking to him about doing this show, the next day he sent me these amazing tracks, which are perfect homages to Bowie and The Who and Chaka Khan.”
After a preview last year at Shoreditch Town Hall, Brennan and fellow members of The Wardrobe Ensemble took the play up to Edinburgh where it earned rave reviews.
Now back in Shoreditch for a longer run, the play will be aiming to humorously highlight the challenges and pitfalls of growing up as a member of the class of ’72.
“You had the first gay pride march in London and Lady Chatterley’s Lover was around,” Brennan says. “But then you had Mary Whitehouse and the National Festival of Light trying to ‘restore Christian morals’. So it was quite an interesting time.”
1972: The Future of Sex 12–23 April Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, EC1V 9LT shoreditchtownhall.com
Part of ‘Deadly Nightshade’, one of Houchen’s pieces set to be exhibited in Pandora’s Box
The work of figurative painter Amanda Houchen is both of this world and otherworldly.
Her ephemeral characters, often inspired by actresses of the 1920s and 1950s, reside in colourful dream-like settings. They gaze out and look through the viewer, as though to question our own reality.
Context is what most of us look for in a figurative painting – the meaning behind the Mona Lisa’s smile. But a recognisable context is what Houchen seeks to deny the viewer.
“I’m interested in exploring the physicality of paint,” says Houchen.
“In this body of work, through the female form, I seek to capture the nature of artifice and the uncanny.”
This month at Unit G gallery off Well Street, Houchen will be exhibiting work from her Pandora’s Box series.
The focus is on the temporary nature of performance and stardom.
A pair of flappers bedecked in pearl necklaces and fur collars gaze out mournfully, their sense of self entirely dependent on the validation they seek from the audience. But a performance can only last so long.
Houchen’s source material includes the more obscure and choreographed settings of burlesque, cabaret or the circus – where people adopt theatrical roles and there’s an element of masquerade.
These are images that have the potential to be mythical, as Houchen combines imagery or tropes from specific eras to create new, unrecognisable images that subvert the viewer’s expectations.
Pandora’s Box 8 – 30 April Unit G, 12A Collent Street, E9 6SG unitg.london
