East End Review

Tag: Space Studios

  • Hackney playwright details foster care experience in debut play

    Hackney playwright details foster care experience in debut play

    Tosin Alabi
    Playwright Tosin Alabi’s debut play about foster care opens next month

    Tosin Alabi was 15 when she was placed into foster care with her 10-year-old sister following the death of their mother.

    Now aged 25, she has started a theatre company Azai Gallery, and written her debut play about her experience in care.

    Four Paintings, which opens in November at Space Studios on Mare Street, recounts those tough initial months after her mother’s death.

    “I went numb for a very long time, I blocked everything out. The experience made me a lot less family orientated,” she says.

    Being without a family meant Tosin struggled to grieve properly or even process what had happened.

    But her foster home she describes as a house “filled with love” – she was even surprised to learn that her foster parents were being paid.

    The experience of being in foster care she found on the whole positive, and credits it for improving her grades and behaviour as a teenager.

    She has less kind words about her social workers, however. During her time in care, she only had one positive experience of a social worker.

    “A lot of people go into social care as a job, not because they want to help,” she explains.

    At 18, Tosin was placed into shared accommodation for care leavers, where she said she received “no support”. So while her sister stayed in foster care, she was “just thrown out into the big world”.

    Four Paintings combines art and performance, with the stage set up as a gallery with paintings on the walls.

    “I thought it would be nice to have art and performance combined as I love both,” she writes on her blog.

    Tosin sent three artist friends the play’s opening monologue and asked them to create paintings based on it.

    “I gave them no creative direction apart from the minimum canvas size of the painting,” she says

    Tosin always wanted art to complement the performance, to challenge and explore its meaning on a deeper level.

    The idea spurred her creativity, and before she had put pen to paper she knew art would play a massive role in her debut play.

    Four Paintings
    10 November
    129–131 Mare Street, E8 3RH
    spacestudios.org.uk

  • Space Studios is ‘reclaiming the future’ from developers

    Space Studios
    An Idea of Progress banner at Space Studios. Photograph: Russell Parton

    A giant banner covering the entire facade of Space Studios on Mare Street was unfurled yesterday, inviting speculation that the building behind it may soon be demolished.

    The banner is of the canvas type used in large-scale construction projects, and on it is a series of images drawn in that computer-generated style used in property development brochures to represent the future of a given site.

    On the banner one can see a swimming pool, a tropical garden and a gravity-defying bendy skyscraper alongside the mind-bending slogan: “The future’s future is in construction.”

    But what could be the next step in the ‘regeneration’ of Hackney is, in fact, part of a project about progress and the complexities of gentrification.

    An Idea of Progress is by Ivan Argote, a 31-year-old artist from Bogotá, Colombia, who lives in Paris. As well as the giant hoarding the project comprises an exhibition of film and collages.

    Over six months Argote visited construction sites across East London and interviewed residents, asking them what they thought about the developments going on around them; whether they liked them and what they would put there given the chance.

    He combined his findings to create a fictional structure that he says represents the real desires of local people.

    “I first came here in August and returned every month,” he says. “By observation and by talking with people I started noticing the aggressiveness of property development in East London. It’s way more violent here than in Paris. In Paris the market is more controlled, for example there are restrictions so that owners cannot raise rents more than 5 per cent a year.

    “In Bogotá they’re developing new neighbourhoods. I remember when I was little boy in Bogotá there were empty fields. But it’s different because there’s not this gentrification phenomenon – the city is actually expanding into the countryside.”

    The Idea of Progress exhibition opens on 21 January at Space Studios, 129-131 Mare St, Hackney, E8 3RH.

     

     

     

     

  • Dance of death on London Fields mourns state of the arts

    Photograph: Tim Bowditch
    Dance of death…’The Keeners’. All photographs by Tim Bowditch, courtesy of Florence Peake and Space Studio

    The piercing cry of a group of mourners is an incongruous spectacle on a bright September afternoon in London Fields.

    And so passersby, some walking dogs, others mid-jog, gathered in curiosity last Saturday whilst five women, dressed in black, emitted spine-chilling wails as hunks of clay slipped through their fingers onto a glossy mirrored dancefloor.

    Photograph: Tim
    Mourning with clay… ‘The Keeners’ by Florence Peake. Photograph: Tim Bowditch

    Amid occasional strains of the cello, the mourners performed their dance of death. Holding bright pink scarves aloft, they flopped to the floor and shrouded their heads, before rising again in angry defiance.

    Baffled onlookers may have felt relieved to learn that these vocal lamentations were part of a performance based on the Celtic custom of ‘keening’, where professional mourners in Irish and Celtic traditions grieve the losses of others on their behalf.

    Keening dates back as far as the sixteenth century, and involves one or a group of women reciting or singing verses about the deceased, often to physical movements such as rocking, kneeling or clapping.

    Artist Florence Peake devised the public performance, which is to form the basis of the inaugural exhibition at Space Studios’s new gallery next month.

    Peake, a painter and choreographer who lives in Walthamstow, learnt about keening from her Irish mother-in-law, but has abstracted the tradition and applied it to what she calls the “commodification and instrumentalisation of art by the corporate world”.

    Photograpgh: Tim Bow
    Reciting ‘losses’… ‘The Keeners’ by Florence Peake. Photograph: Tim Bowditch

    During the performance, the keeners stood behind a microphone to make lamentations about the state of modern culture. “It makes me angry so I had to leave. In the mix of city, dereliction, hedgelands, industrial landscapes and space, will we all just get squashed?” they recited in ghost-like monotone.

    In total, the dancers mourned around 40 ‘losses’, all of which were submitted by the public. These ranged from angry outcries against gentrification in East London (see above), to the loss of Iggy Pop as a countercultural icon due to his willingness to advertise car insurance.

    “Some of these losses are just beautiful and some really funny,” says Peake.

    “One I find particularly amusing was the loss of someone’s usual cruising sites to the Grindr app.

    “Then there are a lot about education, about parenting and the loss of unsupervised childcare, of children being able to play on the streets and things like that. And the loss of arm pit hair.”

    Photograph: Tim Bowditch
    Onlooking… ‘The Keeners’ by Florence Peake. Photograph: Tim Bowditch

    London Fields was chosen for the performance due to it being common land (Lammas Rights for grazing animals).

    The performance will form the basis of exhibition The Keeners, held at Space Studios’ brand new gallery space on Mare Street this month, which according to Artist Commissioning Manager Persilia Caton will comprise “another transformation of the losses”.

    Peake is the first of four artists commissioned by Hackney arts organisation Space for their 2015/16 season. Each of the artists will be producing work that engages with Hackney’s past and present, and there will be a concerted effort to show art more publicly, outside of the traditional gallery setting.

    Florence Peake: The Keeners, from 1 October, Space Studios, 129–131 Mare Street, E8 3RH.  spacestudios.org.uk

     

  • How a video camera became a weapon for feminists

    Jane Fonda in a still taken from Cherchez la femme exhibition at Space Studios
    Jane Fonda in a still from the Cherchez La Femme exhibition at Space Studios

    In late November 1967, the newly-named Sony Corporation –  a young, but blossoming Japanese electronics company –  released the Portapak CV-2400, the world’s first consumer videotape recorder. Battery-powered, portable, and inexpensive: no longer was video the preserve of elite television companies and their hegemonic value systems.

    As the Portapak’s poetic manual put it: “The portable video system represents the essence of decentralised media. One person now becomes an entire TV studio, capable of producing a powerful statement.”

    Though Sony’s advertising campaigns for the Portapak depicted the video camera being used by all echelons of society, according to Alaina Claire Feldman, head of exhibitions for Independent Curators International, it became a potent weapon for French feminist collectives during the 1970s. Activist groups like Vidéa and Insoumuses documented wild demonstrations along the boulevards of Paris and radical manifestos against male power.

    Feldman, the organiser of a new exhibition at Hackney’s SPACE studios, which is screening a number of these engrossing, politicised videos, explains: “The Portapak offered an opportunity for documentation of what was happening in the streets, in the factories, in private libraries and conversations, but also for creative critique of the moving image itself.”

    “The portable video came exactly at the right moment: the start of the women’s liberation movement in France, hot on the heels of May ‘68,” she continued. “It was also totally unexpected that women would embrace technology at the time, and because video was so new, it had no history or canon to struggle with; it was entirely open.”

    The name of the exhibition, ‘Cherchez La Femme’, is a reappropriated French colloquialism that traditionally suggests the root of all problems is women. It is this sort of institutional misogyny that these recently-translated feminist films were, and still are, railing against.

    Maso and Miso Go Boating (1976), for example, is a scathing meditation on the rigid roles that women are permitted in public life. After recording footage of a French television talk show, Delphine Seyrig, along with three other women, eviscerate the shocking statements made by Françoise Giroud, supposedly the country’s Minister for Women’s well being. They edit, freeze-frame, superimpose, and add hand-written titles to Giroud’s various patronising claims: that surgery is too difficult for women, or how women’s ambitions should never go beyond pleasing their man.

    The videos show both the dynamic potential in, and the collective creation of the films, mirroring how the feminist movement actually functioned. In Kate Millet Speaks about Prostitution with Feminists (1975), we see this reality: sat crosslegged on the floor, in a room with bookshelves filled to the brim, French and American feminists passionately debate the plight of the prostitutes, while ceaselessly puffing away on their Gauloises. Innovations in technology can often lead to societal change, and the Sony Portapak was no exception. The dissemination of low-budget and lo-fi work like this forged networks of exchange, catalysed strains of guerilla television, and allowed self-representation for many women. Whether these feminist collective’s goals have been achieved is still far from certain, but Feldman has “hope there’s some consequences that eventually come out of it” for the residents of Hackney that get to see them.

    Cherchez La Femme is at SPACE Studios, 129—131 Mare Street, E8 3RH until 13 July.