TONIGHT AT WATERSIDE PROJECT SPACE

Reflecting on Marcin Dudek’s tunnel installation in I Will Eat This Sleepy Town, as well as his earlier works that drew on the underground passages at the US-Mexico border and a tunnel built in Sarajevo by the Bosnian resistance army – Waterside Project Space presents The Cu Chi Tunnels, a film by Mickey Grant, screened in tandem with two of Dudek's own video works.

Wednesday, 26 January 2011, 7pm, Tickets £2

http://watersideprojectspace.org/dudek-washington/cu-chi-tunnels.html

THE LONDON ART FAIR

Last night [DoR] attended the preview of The London Fair. Last year co-founder of [DoR], Amber Ablett exhibited work in Print Now at BEARSPACE. This year the Arts Projects area of the fair seemed smaller but as innovative, although the sparkling wine made the experience all more bearable.

Art Projects has now been a major part of London Art Fair for six years. In 2010 we expanded into a new space and this year will be our biggest ever with 31 galleries featuring emerging artists and new work. Established as one of the most exciting sections of the Fair, it features solo shows, curated group displays and large-scale installations with galleries from across the world.

The fair, as ever, was extremely busy and it was difficult to take any serious notice of the art through the mayhem of people. I did however very much enjoy attending the charity auction hosted by Christie's on the top level of the fair. There was quite an amount of money being spent, unfortunately not be me.

http://www.londonartfair.co.uk/

SASSOON GALLERY THE IMMORTAL

[DoR] visited Sassoon Gallery, Peckham for the first time this week to see:

CHARLES DRINKWATER | UNA SAVIC | KYLE ZETO

13.01.11-30.01.11

Sisters Burn, residing at Sassoon Gallery, are delighted to announce the launch of their 2011 program with The Immortal. The installation brings together artists Charles Drinkwater, Una Savic and Kyle Zeto in their first ever collaboration. Abandoning their own particular practices, the artists have worked to combine their thoughts and talents in a singular installation for Sassoon Gallery.

The root of The Immortal is R.S. Fitter’s book London’s Natural History. Published in 1945, the book documents the impact of wartime bombing on urban flora and fauna, and highlights the dispersion of otherwise rare or foreign plants and the resurgence of plants affected directly by the bombings. As part of the numerous appendices in the book, a catalogue of the plants found amongst the bombsites in London is included in a typically nonchalant manner befitting an ecological study. Amongst the list are plants with evocative names like Gallant Soldiers, Senecio Squalidus and Many-Seeded Goosefoot. In hindsight, the cataloguing of these opportunist bomb-site plants evokes a certain gravity. The plants are forgotten and ethereal memorials; to physical destruction, historic events and of our understanding of these past moments.

It is the potential of these subtle and overlooked memorials that artists Charles Drinkwater, Una Savic and Kyle Zeto have chosen to explore in their collaborative installation The Immortal. Consisting of video and installation, the exhibition comprises of a film set, a consciously considered and constructed installation within the gallery alongside a real-time presentation of the set itself. Encompassing the names of these plants, and with Zeto’s mask construction as sentinel, and reminiscent in form of monumental memorial structure, the installation is a temporary construction, impermanent and allusive, though rendered permanent and formal through transmission. Creating a cyclical loop between real time experience and filmic representation, The Immortal blurs the lines between how we conceive of and appreciate our past, and present.

The Immortal is a physical representation of the act of memorializing, and an illumination of our relationship to these constructions; be they temporary and fleeting, or permanent in stone.

http://www.thesassoongallery.co.uk/

I WILL EAT THIS SLEEPY TOWN AT WATERSIDE PROJECT SPACE

Last week [DoR] attended the Private View of I Will Eat This Sleepy Town at Waterside Project Space. In the main gallery space Marcin Dudek created a large scale site specific installation you must navigate through. The exhibition consist of works by both Marcin Dudek and Ben Washington. This exhibition is highly recommended.

What we call ‘progress’ doesn’t necessarily take the direction we expect. Sometimes, in an attempt to ‘modernize’, the march of society pulls the rug from beneath our feet.

In their two-man exhibition, Marcin Dudek and Ben Washington create parallel large-scale installations. Both artists pick up on the need to ‘push forward’, the need to dig or climb, but also the dangers of being swallowed up or lost in the clouds.

Marcin Dudek’s work takes as its inspiration the town of Katowice in Polish Silesia – in the 1970s, a model industrial city, with high-rise architecture springing up from the work of the coalmines underneath. Excessive exploitation (or over-mining) undermined this success story, and the ground has opened up, slowly swallowing the city. Using little more than cellophane and tape, Dudek’s tunnel installation leads us into the hollows of the earth, with traps of light, sound and video.

Ben Washington’s sculptures – precarious, unbalanced objects – emerge from the sink-holes and the rubble. Suspended underneath, Washington’s works bring attention to the structures and systems that keep our environments and landscapes in the orientation we have become accustomed to: the right way up. The sculptures are at once architectural models, abstract mountainscapes, floating cities and stellar systems, and bring together the Monolith, video games, and holiday snaps from Costa del Sol.

This underground utopia - a cross between the nuclear shelter and the hanging gardens - allows us to inhabit the man-made and the natural at the same time. From here, in the safety of the infra-thin, we can touch the spaces not just in the physical, but also in the emotional and psycho-geographic.

http://watersideprojectspace.org/dudek-washington/i-will-eat-this-sleepy-town.html

FEATURED IN ART WEDNESDAY !!!!!

Thanks Art Wednesday for having us on your website!!!

http://artwednesday.com/2011/01/12/details-on-request/

At AW HQ, we’re big fans of [Details on Request], the London-Fields-based curatorial group whose modus operandi is to bring art – over a number of highly flexible genres, including performance, spoken-word, and installation – closer to the public, both by making it infinitely more accessible and, perhaps crucially, by making its processes more transparent. Here, co-founders Eloise Jones and Amber Ablett explain to us in their own words what [DoR] stands for, what the team has achieved this year, and just what we can look forward to from them in 2011.

WHIRLY GIG CINEMA AT RICH MIX

[DoR] missed the last of Whirly Gigs events at the Rich Mix, but here that it was a great success!!

With a total of 15 short films- this fridays event shouldn't be missed:

Making Tracks on Friday

It is only a tiny smattering of days until we return to the Rich Mix and continue our collaboration with the alluring and fantabulous Cabinet of Living Cinema. The concept: we provide an awesome programme of short films and The Cabinet rescore them. Live! And for most of the films, no one except the band will have heard the new scores before. To top it off, this time we are part of the deeply cool and edgy London Short Film Festival.

We will have an even bigger variety of films than ever; to tie in with the festival, the majority are by filmmakers whose work as been a part of LSFF in past (and present) years. Max Hattler, The Astburys, Sophie Windsor Clive, Magali Charrier, Kiron Hussain, Bella Fenning and Kayla Parker have all contributed to the festival, and we can't wait to show their work in a new light.

We also welcome back Tom Chick, Beatrice Baumgartner, Lesley Butler and Ioli Zalimoglou, whose work we showed in December. Don't necessarily expect a repeat of last time though; The Cabinet work in mysterious ways and who knows what they might come up with this time round!

On top of this we will be throwing two brand new submissions, by Tom Bailey and Kat Magrowitz, into the Whirlygig mixing pot. You can find lots more information, including a full film listing, on our website http://whirlygigcinema.com/films/

Making Tracks II will take place in the Rich Mix Bar on Friday 14th January. Doors will open at 7.30pm for a prompt programme start at 8pm. If you are coming, please try to come for the whole night - this event is a dish best served whole! There are still tickets available, save yourself a few coins by booking in advance. Get them at http://www.richmix.org.uk/film_makingtracks.htm.

BALFRON PROJECT- BOW ARTS TRUST

An architectural icon of 1960s New-Brutalism in the East End and its current inhabitants. A large format film camera. An hour in November 2010. Ten exposures. One image. This is The Balfron Project.

Not only did [DoR] take part in photographing event (a really fun evening to get the community together) but on Thursday we went along to the Bow Arts Trust to see the final photograph- beautifully displayed in the Nunnery- the photograph was lit like an ancient shrine at the end of the tunnel like, cavernous gallery.

Find out more here: (http://balfronproject.co.uk/pages/Home.aspx)

At 27 stories high, Balfron Tower looms rather imperiously on the periphery of the city, an imposing and somewhat sinister gatekeeper to the sprawling metropolis. Designed by the renowned architect Ernő Goldfinger in 1963, the Grade II listed tower block has previously been used as both a setting and subject, often being included as the means to a post-apocalyptic end. Its dystopic influence can be felt in JG Ballard’s novel Highrise (1975), flashes of the tower in shades of scarlet rage set the scene for the Oasis music video Morning Glory (1995) and it also features in the British horror film 28 Days Later (2002) that depicts a society in a state of catastrophic collapse.

Conceived by artist Simon Terrill, this project does not seek to fictionalise nor expose the lives of those who call the tower home. What The Balfron Project has done, for the first time since the building’s inception, is to generate an arena for reciprocal viewing. For one hour in November, a camera was focused on the tower and the current residents of Balfron Tower were invited to be in the picture, in the manner of their choosing. Film lights illuminated the building as people crowded onto their balconies and improvised performances on the grounds below in time for the designated sound cue that was used to announce the next shot. In this representation of the Balfron Tower, it was the role of the character to compose the subject.

The Balfron Tower is the latest production in Simon Terrill’s ongoing series of photographic performance events exploring ideas of community and the nature of crowds. The final mural-sized photograph features in the exhibition alongside related works and documentary footage by Ollie Harrop and Tim Bowditch.