Title: Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa
Location: Rokeby, 37 Store Street
Description: Butcher’s is proud to present the first solo show of Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa with her installation \’A Brush for Robben Island\’ (2008). Taking place at Rokeby by special invitation, Butcher’s presentation is part of Syndicate, a programme of multimedia events featuring a range of artists, curators and architects.
Start Time: 18:30
Date: 2008-12-10

Between 1961 and 1991, over 3,000 men were imprisoned on Robben Island for their opposition to South Africa’s apartheid government. Although subject to a harsh and physically repressive regime, the inmates of this prison nevertheless developed ingenious strategies to convene and to communicate.

Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa’s installation A Brush for Robben Island re-imagines these prisoners’ covert social space, taking as its starting point three seemingly unstable referents: a gesture that was used to mark this site, the sound that gesture produced, and the language that was used to describe it. The gesture in question is the prisoners’ version of applause, which they made by rubbing their hands together - an action that was termed ‘giving a brush’. Sonically alluding to this site and act of resistance, A Brush for Robben Island invites us to consider our relationship with a history that is fragmenting and fading from view.

A ‘brush’ connotes that most traditional tool of fine art practice, and strategies of representation are also questioned by this installation. ‘A Brush for Robben Island’ explores the potential of a politicised aesthetic, rejecting any assertion of an opposition between formal aspects of an artwork and its political content.

http://butchersprojects.org
http://www.wolukau-wanambwa.net
http://www.rokebygallery.com

Title: Audio Forensic
Location: IMT Gallery- Image Music and Text
Description: Comprising of ambitious works by nine artists who employ sound as the principle media of their practice, Audio Forensics demonstrates the breadth of engagement with sound in the arts, and how it can be re-evaluated in the context of an increasingly noisy world. The artists exhibiting are Libero Colimberti, Jan Hendrickse, Simone Izzi, Nitin Lachhani, Luc Messinezis, Maria Papadomanolaki, Vytis Puronas, Mark Shorey and Mark Wright.

I M T
UNIT 2/210 CAMBRIDGE HEATH ROAD
LONDON E2 9NQ UK

Audio Forensics is an exhibition and symposium presenting the final work of the first MA Sound Arts graduates of London College of Communication. The groundbreaking work in the exhibition demonstrates the high level of critical debate in sonic disciplines fostered by the university’s Department of Sound Art and Design since 1998. The exhibition is co-curated by ELECTRA and IMT
Start Time: 18:00
Date: 2008-11-27

Sound art encompasses a wide range of forms and concerns and has its
precedence across many creative fields, yet, as these artists demonstrate, the
acknowledgment of sound’s significance in the arts is becoming of greater
importance as technologies develop, and as the public become ever more
aware of the interactions between sound, space and artistic practice.

Some of the works make one aware of interactions with sound that are often
overlooked, such as the effect of sonic frequencies on the body in Shorey’s
work. Puronas’s audiovisual installation immerses the visitor in questions
of reality, hyper-reality and the authenticity of digital technology, whilst Izzi
turns installation against the audience as an analogy of the psychological
pressures of contemporary society. Others, such as Messinezis’s collection
of sonic curiosities, in an audio equivalent to the Wunderkammer, or
Lachhani’s extraordinary 3D sculptures of sound waves, translate sound
into contexts more familiar in the visual arts presenting experiences that are
at once recognisable and alien.

Other work in the exhibition explores and re-evaluates major disciplines in
sound art, whether through Hendrickse’s compositional use of air currents
to play both musical and non-musical instruments, or Colimberti’s
subversion of the use of music and the sound effect in film. Likewise
Papadomanolaki and Wright explore the field recording as a discipline
through which to narrate place, the space outside the gallery and the Abbeys
of the north of England respectively, demonstrating the capacity of sound to
evoke absent environments in very tangible ways.

As a whole the exhibition provides an extraordinarily comprehensive enquiry
into how sound, and its manipulation, influences our experience and
understanding of our environment.

On Sunday 30th November there will be a symposium in which keynote
speakers Ben Borthwick, Assistant Curator at Tate Modern, and Steven
Connor, professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck, will address
issues of sonic practice raised by the exhibition. This event will also give
visitors the opportunity to talk to the artists personally about their work.

Audio Forensics is an exhibition and symposium presenting the final work of
the first MA Sound Arts graduates of London College of Communication. The
groundbreaking work in the exhibition demonstrates the high level of critical
debate in sonic disciplines fostered by the university’s Department of Sound
Art and Design since 1998. The exhibition is co-curated by ELECTRA and
IMT.

Title: Thomas Hirschhorn, Doing Art politically: What Does This Mean?
Location: The Geological Society Lecture Room, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London
Description: The Royal Academy Schools Annual Lecture:
a talk by Thomas Hirschhorn ‘Doing Art politically: What Does This Mean?’ (booking 0844 209 0360 / fee: £7.00/£4.00 inc.)
Start Time: 18:30
Date: 2008-11-05

The Royal Academy Schools will hold its first annual lecture on 5th November 2008. The inaugural lecture will be given by artist Thomas Hirschhorn and is entitled DOING ART POLITICALLY: WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Thomas Hirschhorn who was born in Switzerland in 1957, initially worked in Paris as a graphic designer during the 1980’s with Communist design group Grapus. He left Grapus to focus on installation pieces. He is best known for his site specific installation works, which can be found both inside and outside the gallery setting. Hirschhorn says “Today there is great confusion about the question concerning what ‘Political’ and ‘political’ are. I am only interested in what is really political, the ‘Political’ with a capital P, the political that implicates: Where do I stand? Where does the other stand? What do I want? What does the other want? The ‘political’ with a small p, the opinions and forging of the majorities, does not interest, and has never interested me. For I am concerned with making my art politically.“

The annual lecture will form part of one of four annual events run by the Royal Academy Schools which are open to both the public and Royal Academy Schools students alike.

The events are supported by the David Lean Foundation.

The Royal Academy Schools are run by artists for artists and is a leading centre for the postgraduate study of fine art; offering the only three-year, full time course in the UK. The RA Schools offer a forum for a lively programme of events, with lectures and individual tutorials provided by Royal Academicians, international contemporary artists, critics, writers and theorists.

Title: The First Pictures I Enjoyed
Location: Frieze Talks
Description: Writer and artist Alasdair Gray in conversation with novelist and artist Tom McCarthy.

Start Time: 15:00
Date: 2008-10-17

Title: The Ideology of the \’Iconic\’
Location: ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION
Description: Love her or loathe her\’ says Kirsty Wark of Madonna, \’you cannot underestimate the impact she has had on music, or her iconic status.\’
The word \’iconic\’ might be the best way into a discussion of where postmodernism\’s collapse of high and low has led us: to a situation in which opting out of mass market phenomena simply isn\’t considered to be an option. The \’iconic\’ as an ideology means that, regardless of taste, we all have to pay attention to – and analyse, preferably in a sub-Barthesian manner infused with terms like \’guilty pleasures\’ and \’getting my fix\’ – a new canon in which commercial status and cultural status are one and the same thing. As a result, even in the academy quantitative terms have swamped qualitative ones, and criticism – co-opted and confounded by the comforting repetitions of celebrity culture and PR – is in crisis. As we approach the end of this postmodern tyranny, Momus signals what he calls Unpop as one possible exit strategy.

Momus is a singer, writer and artist living in Berlin. As well as 18 albums of \’disorienteering\’ pop music, he\’s written for Wired, Frieze, and has a weekly design and culture slot on the website of the New York Times. His first novel, The Book of Jokes, will appear in 2009, when Sternberg will also publish his Book of Scotlands, a piece of speculative non-fiction listing 1000 parallel world Scotlands.

Future guests in the ‘Pop and Populism’ Lecture series include Sam Jacob.

Start Time: 18:00
Date: 2008-10-14

Title: Przemek Matecki
Location: Hollybush Garden
Description: Przemek Matecki is a lover of the city – only here can he find traces of other people’s lives. He walks, looks around, rummages, finds and examines - collecting things that other people have left behind. Matecki is currently fascinated with found images and in particular two kinds of images; the iconic image of a pop star or a model, often found in magazines, and the anonymous image of an individual in a portrait or a family photograph. Most of Matecki’s paintings and collages consist of a careful balance of found image and abstract painting. Neither one leads the way, the two equally influencing each other.

Start Time: 18:30
Date: 2008-10-13

Faced with these images and photographs of known or unknown people, the viewer might start reading meaning into the painting, trying to put together a story about the faces, bodies, objects and the sometime fragments on show. When asked what it is we see in his paintings Matecki answers – “what you see is nothing” - it simply isn’t in his interest to speculate about meaning on behalf of the beholder. Leaving little clues in his paintings he seems more concerned with posing counter questions; what is an image, how is meaning produced and interpreted, to what extent can an image be disseminated objectively and what part of the understanding is subjective?

The subjects of the paintings are eclectic, with many allusions to history and tradition on the one hand and popular/street culture on the other. Hypothetically Matecki could belong to the disputed movement Neoism. It would suit his attitude - one that converges life and reality and which seeks to discredit a hierarchy of values. Punk has unquestionably influenced Matecki’s sensibility - the anarchist spontaneity, the simplicity, the casualness of his brush strokes, the love of the grotesque and the penchant for trash. By deliberately exposing the imperfect and the cumbersome Matecki wishes to retain the human and the flawed. There is definitely an element of anarchy in Matecki’s work, but countered by an air of melancholy.

Matecki can work on a single painting for months; the seeming spontaneity and emotional directness of his art is an illusion in the eye of the beholder. Not getting the ‘point’ of exhibitions, Matecki’s interest in a piece ends when he decides that it is finished. Ultimately it is painting as a process, as a medium that he is committed to.

Przemek Matecki lives and works in Warsaw. This will be his first solo show in Britain. Recent exhibitions include Past Present curated by Vincent Honoré for the Zabludowicz Collection at 176, Place to live, place to love, BWA Gallery, Wroclaw, Poland, Efekt czerwonych oczu Fotografia polska XXI wieku, Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw

Title: Talk: Ryan Gander
Location: Somerset House
Description: In conversation with exhibition co-curator Emily King.

Start Time: 18:30
Date: 2008-11-20
End Time: 19:30

Title: Dot Dot Dot Magazine Evenings
Location: Somerset House at The Studio
Description: Dexter Sinister organise three nights of talks, which will create the content for the next issue
of internationally renowned arts journal Dot Dot Dot. Dexter Sinister will effectively compose a \’live\’ issue of the complete journal, existing in ‘real’ time before being hardened into printed form.
(Limited capacity)
Wednesday 29 October, Thursday 30 October, Friday 31 October

Date: 2008-10-28

Title: Jonas Mekas Presents Flux Party
Location: London Rio Cinema
Description: Legendary artist-filmmaker Jonas Mekas presents FLUX PARTY featuring the Fluxfilm Anthology as assembled by George Maciunas, rare Fluxus audio and surprise performances. Drinks and specially made Fluxcakes will be served.

Fluxus was a provocative and humorous art movement that produced objects, performances and events which challenged the boundaries between traditional art and everyday life. Early Fluxus pieces included feeding a bale of hay to a piano, a painting to be stepped on, or the sound of dripping water.

The Fluxfilm Anthology, showing here in its most comprehensive version to date, includes \”Zen for Film\” (clear film for collecting dust), \”Four\” (Yoko Ono’s infamous film of bare bottoms), \”Smoking\” (cigarette smoke shot with a high speed camera) and other films of comical street performances, counting games, x-ray movies and interference patterns. The Fluxfilms embodied the minimal aesthetic, playfulness and poetic dimensions of Fluxus and transposed its performative aspect into the cinema.

This informal late night screening is a unique chance to see films by artists such as George Brecht, John Cale, Dick Higgins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Paul Sharits, Chieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell and Robert Watts presented on the big screen of the Rio Cinema, East London\’s splendid art deco picture palace. Jonas Mekas will be present to discuss Fluxus and his friend and fellow Lithuanian émigré, the late George Maciunas.

Seminal figures of the New York downtown art scene since the beginning of the 1960s, Jonas Mekas (b.1922) and George Maciunas (1931-78) were connected through many different projects. Mekas was a central force of the avant-garde film scene and presented early screenings at Maciunas’ AG Gallery. Maciunas coordinated Fluxus as an international community of artists, whose contributors also included Joseph Beuys, Henry Flynt, Takehisa Kosugi, John Lennon and La Monte Young.

Maciunas was also fundamental in the emergence of SoHo as an artistic centre in New York. As early as 1966, he began to purchase dilapidated industrial buildings and convert them into cooperative real estate, starting the trend for loft style living. Jonas Mekas was one of the first to participate in the Fluxhouse venture, acquiring space for both his own home and the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque / Anthology Film Archives.

Last year, Mekas returned to Lithuania to inaugurate the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center in Vilnius, presenting his own Fluxus collection to the public for the first time in a joint Mekas / Maciunas exhibition. The centre is planning an extensive film archive and a Fluxus Research Institute. In 2009, Mekas will act as the Ambassador of Vilnius during its year as the European Capital of Culture.

Curated by Anne-Sophie Dinant and Mark Webber. Presented by the South London Gallery. With thanks to Benn Northover, Serpentine Gallery, Re:Voir and the Rio Cinema.

Start Time: 23:15
Date: 2008-10-17