East End Review

Tag: Stour Space

‘Breaking’ the January mould: Hackney Wick warehouse to hold dance jam party

Are music and breakdancing enough to sweep away the January blues? All photographs: JAMuary

Perhaps January has the hardest job of all, forever playing backing dancer to the all-star bingeing of December and New Year. The fridge is bare, payday couldn’t come sooner and the most depressing day of the year is forecast.

But that doom and gloom looks set to break down with the third edition of JAMuary – a global, grass roots dance jam that promises world-class breaking, taking place on Saturday 30 January across two rooms in an East London warehouse.

Special guest ‘breakers’ and dancers hailing from New York, Paris, Oslo, Stockholm and Marseille to name but a few, will converge upon Stour Space in Hackney Wick.

Accompanied by a line-up of wax DJs, the international invitees will share the dancefloor with a UK cohort from all over the country to create the unique community atmosphere that defines these back-to-basics parties.

JAMuary is the annual dance beginning-of-the-year blowout organised by a collective of London-based breakdancers, artists, DJs and musicians called Hashtag Unity, who throw free parties and regular open events across the capital to promote ‘unity in the community’ – look out for their monthly parties at Bohemia Café in Hackney Central. And it’s their passion for the collective dance that is helping keep B-boy culture alive in London.

Music duties will be led by Hector Plimmer who has had releases on Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings as well as an appearance from Ninja Tune affiliate Dolenz. Live band Smith and the Honey Badgers are also set to soundtrack some of the night with their infectious analogue funk, while Colectivo Futuro have just announced a special DJ set celebrating female artists.

It’s rare not to have a stage at live dance and music performances, but that’s exactly what it’s like at JAMuary, where the warm vibe is all about inclusivity; no barriers, no spotlights, just an open floor where everyone is welcome – boys and girls – to join in and be part of the community.

Get tickets for JAMuary here. (http://www.residentadvisor.net/event.aspx?774279)

Facebook event. (https://www.facebook.com/events/1722816361285993/)

Hashtag Unity (https://www.facebook.com/hashtagunity/) throw free monthly parties at Bohemia Café in Hackney Central.

January 26, 2016
Va-va zoom! Photomonth is upon us once more

Living in Exile by Matthew Aslett. Part of F8 Collective launch, until 18 October at Hive Dalston

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”.

Harrodsburg by Dougie Wallace. Until 19 October at theprintspace

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.

Dalston Junction by Pete Burke, part of Glimpsing the Future, until 1 November

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 Gallery

Oculi 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

Old Woman with Narcissus by Piotr Karpinski, Let’s Talk about Life & Death Darling from 1–30 November at St James the Great Church

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.

October 7, 2015
Artist’s alter-egos and ‘Tinder men’ go on display at Save Changes exhibition

Bookish: alter-ego Theodosia Fatale

An artist is exhibiting her own alter-egos this month at an exhibition mapping the impact of online profiling at Stour Space gallery.

Save Changes sees artists Bettina John, Sheila Rennick and Paula Varjack address how social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest can affect people’s sense of identity.

Bettina John, a 34-year-old artist and costume designer, experimented by using only the internet to make new friends when living in New York as an artist in residence in 2012.

She then chose the five friends she felt were the most interesting and built alter-egos based on their characters.

These include a dogmatic fashionista called Belinda Evangelica, who will be launching a ‘music manifesto’ and single during the exhibition.

“I like her because she just says what she wants,” says John. “She’s really bitchy, and she’s the kind of girl that just has two categories: black and white. She has a Pinterest page with three boards: hate it, love it and irrelevant – because that’s how she sees the world. And she dresses only in black and white.”

Guitar heroine: Belinda Evangelista

John calls her characters “mega stereotypes”, each one with a distinctive look to go with their exaggerated character traits. There’s a cabaret performer, an author and a ‘meta-character’ who tweets about all the other characters. ‘Cyber hippie’ Colbee Hawkins_89 has her own blog and is an activist.

“She needs a lot of in depth fieldwork, so I need to be her for quite some time,” says John. “I went with her to Istanbul and was her for four solid days.”

Being a made-up person for four days straight sounds intense to say the least, but John finds it fascinating how different people react to her characters.

“Colbee really gets attention. People always want to take her photograph and know where she’s from.”

Cyber hippie: Colbee Hawkins_89

At the exhibition opening on 8 May, three of John’s characters were in attendance and made introductory speeches. For the rest of the month there will be two installations – one for the work of the characters, and the other being the characters’ worlds.

Two more artists will be taking part in Save Changes. Sheila Rennick will be exhibiting ‘Tinder men’, paintings of the profiles of men from dating site Tinder, and video artist Paula Varjack will be also displaying work following her recent show about finding freedom in reinvention.

Bettina John as performer Miss Dixie de Rose

Save Changes
Stour Space
7 Roach Road, Hackney Wick, E3 2PA
Until 1 June
stourspace.co.uk

May 12, 2015
Science and art combine to highlight River Lea pollution

Multi-media artist Rob St John. Photograph: Emma Cardwell

A water fowl making its nest with rubbish, green pond weed covering a river’s surface with tyres and empty plastic bottles. To most of us, river pollution looks something like this. But for Rob St John, there many different ways of seeing – and hearing – water pollution.

The Lancastrian artist, writer and musician, was commissioned by the Love the Lea project, run by charity Thames21, to use art and science to explore and document pollution creatively in London’s second largest waterway.

Almost a year later, and Surface Tension – an album of new music and field recordings – is complete. A book of photography and writing is to accompany the music, and this month photographs from the project will be on display at Stour Space in Hackney Wick.

Ben Fenton, of Thames21, commissioned Rob St John with the hope of raising awareness of pollution in the Lea in ways that can engage new audiences.

Over the course of a few weekends last summer, St John walked most of the length of the middle and lower Lea, taking with him various bits of recording equipment.

This included special microphones in his ears that record a 360 degree stereo field. Listening back he heard swans landing, bikes going past. Then, to capture the sound of the river itself he used hydrophones, microphones that go underneath the surface of the river and pick up what’s going on down there.

“It’s a bit like fishing for sound,” St John tells me. “ Sometimes it’s absolutely nothing, sometimes it’s really cool rhythms from propellors or boats.

“One of the most unusual sounds is when you put the hydrophones into pond weed. What it’s doing is photosynthesizing so it’s giving off all these tiny air bubbles.

“When they hit hydrophones they give off this wonderful bubbly, murky crackle, almost like electronica. “Under the surface of the Lea, with its oil slicks and duck weed, a surprisingly diverse world has survived.

Surface of the River Lea. Photograph: Rob St John

“The Lea’s amazing because there are still plants and animals and fish living there against all the odds. I was fascinated by the diversity that exists below the surface levels. So surface tension became this organising idea as a project title. It’s about the tension between two different things: clean and polluted, natural and unnatural, air and water.”

Alongside sound recordings, St John was portrayed the plight of the Lea visually by taking photographs with a pin hole camera made from a Lesney toy matchbox (the Lesney factory was on the river at Hackney Wick) and a vintage 120 film camera.

During the winter months, he then went back up to Yorkshire, taking with him bottles and bottles of Lea water, which he used to develop the film. “My girlfriend had the horror of seeing that I’d filled my studio with developing trays full of Lea water, and I had various films all soaking and degrading over different amounts of time.

“Some of them came out almost a bit out of focus and hazy, as a result of duckweed, oil or decaying leaves. Some of them had these incredible light flares and some of them just had a really light footprint of these weird microscopic bits of life.”

Scientifically, one of the most impressive methods used to create the music of Surface Tension is called sonification. St John gathered data from volunteer UCL scientists about pollutants in the river and was able to turn it into music using software.

“I fed samples in and then just let the data from each site define what that sound did. I’m really fascinated because it’s a very aesthetic and even arbitrary process what you decide to map onto what. It’s an area where there’s this real tension between science and scientific data and aesthetics and art, and that’s something I’m really interested in.”

Coming from Lancashire, it was interesting to hear St John’s perspective on the River Lea. “Maybe because it’s been so canalised it almost doesn’t feel like a river,” he says. “At least compared to when it flows round the back of Hackney Marshes where it seems to take on that lease of life again for a mile or so. That loss of wildness makes me ask if we’ve forgotten this is potentially an important biodiverse ecosystem.”

Surface Tension
Until 4 May
Stour Space
7 Roach Road, E3 2PA

Listen and order Surface Tension book/CD at surfacetensionriverlea.bandcamp.com/ album/surface-tension
surfacetension.org.uk

April 9, 2015