Title: Blow Up: Exploding Sound and Noise (London to Brighton 1959-1969)
Location: FTHo, 210 Bellenden Road, London SE15 4BW, http://www.flattimeho.org.uk/project/41/
Description: featuring material from AMM, Better Books, Bob Cobbing, DIAS, Coleridge Goode, Joe Harriott, James Joyce, Jeff Keen, John Latham, Annea Lockwood, Gustav Metzger, John Stevens, Val Wilmer and more.

PRESS RELEASE

Flat Time House hosts an exhibition of artworks, archive, movies and sound curated by Tony Herrington (Editor-in-Chief & Publisher, The Wire) and David Toop (musician, curator, long-time collaborator of John Latham).

For a period in the 1960s there was a great creative synergy in the UK between the visual arts, experimental film, free jazz, psychedelic rock, and the energetic poetry scene that formed the UK\’s so-called Underground. BLOW UP will present a visual and aural map of those connections through art works, recordings, archival film and documents, contemporary accounts, posters and album art.

The artist John Latham, who lived at Flat Time House until his death in 2006, was a central protagonist in this explosion of cross-talk and the mythologies surrounding his film Speak (1962) were a catalyst for exhibition. Speak is a powerfully strobing, paper-disc animation and, although it precedes the psychedelics of the high sixties by half a decade, its physical effect on the viewer is typical of the whole mind/body experiences of the early light-show gigs of Soft Machine or Pink Floyd and the environmental happenings of the late 60s organised by artists including Cobbing, Keen, Latham and Jeff Nuttall.

In fact, Speak illuminated some of the seminal events of the UK\’s new counter culture: it served as the Floyd\’s light show at early gigs at the UFO club and the Roundhouse; it was screened at Better Books on Charing Cross Road, the bookshop where Bob Cobbing hatched plans with Allen Ginsberg and Alex Trocchi for the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall, and founded the London Filmmakers Coop with Keen and others in 1966. But it is the film\’s soundtrack that really connects the dots between London\’s art scene and contemporaries in free jazz and psychedelic rock: remarkably Latham rejected as \’too musical\’ scores recorded for him first by the Joe Harriott Quintet and then the Pink Floyd, before adding his own circular-saw soundtrack, pointing towards the simultaneously emerging noise aesthetic.

This exhibition begins to write a history of these connections, artistic, personal, or just in the air, and Speak\’s story is just one of the many told in BLOW UP.
Date: 2010-07-09

Title: Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs
Location: IMT Unit2/210, Cambridge Heath Road, London, E2 9NQ UK
Description: Dead Fingers Talk is an exhibition presenting two unreleased tape experiments by William Burroughs from the mid 1960s alongside responses by 23 artists, musicians, writers, composers and curators.

Few writers have exerted as great an influence over such a diverse range of art forms as William Burroughs. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and Junky, continues to be regularly referenced in music, visual art, sound art, film, web-based practice and literature. One typically overlooked, yet critically important, manifestation of his radical ideas about manipulation, technology and society is found in his extensive experiments with tape recorders in the 1960s and ’70s. Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs is the first exhibition to truly demonstrate the diversity of resonance in the arts of Burroughs’ theories of sound.
Date: 2010-07-09

Title: NARCISSUS TRANCE
Location: E:ventGallery, 96 Teesdale Street, London E2 6PU
Description: The exhibition explores McLuhan’s premise that the technological dynamics of the present are concealed from human perception via an innate protective mechanism he defined as the Narcissus Trance. A process that anaesthetises the nervous system in order to allow technological media to merge with the mind. During the advent of consumer electronics, McLuhan warned that the new dawning age of instantaneity would produce an accelerated phase of transition that would lead ultimately to ‘pain and identity loss’ in humanity as the nervous system struggled to compensate for an ever increasing rate of change. He believed the only hope for the future given this predicament was to break the feedback loop imposed by the trance, and instead access technological media through a state of active conscious awareness. Within his ambition he proposed artists to be the instigators of this mass shift in perception.
Date: 2010-07-09

Title: Trisha Brown: Early Works
Location: Tate Modern, Turbine Hall
Description: Created between 1968 and 1975, Trisha Brown\’s pioneering Early Works blur the boundaries between dance and installation art. Originally created for loft spaces and art galleries as well as the outdoors, the Company now brings this collection of works for the first time to UK audiences in a gallery setting.

Rigorous yet playful, these iconic works include Accumulation (1971), Group Primary Accumulation (1973), Sticks (1973), Figure Eight (1974) and Spanish Dance (1973). From the starting point on the bridge of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, the audience is directed to other parts of the gallery to discover the works as they unfold amongst the permanent collection. This is a unique opportunity to see seminal works that have influenced dancemakers worldwide.
Date: 2010-10-16

Title: The Most Beautiful Swiss Books, in London
Location: Café Oto
Description: Sunday, 25 October, 7 pm: Opening party
Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2009-10-25

Helvetic Centre and the Swiss Federal Office of Culture cordially invite you to:

The Most Beautiful Swiss Books, in London
25–29.10. 2009

at
Café Oto
18–22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London E8 3DL
www.cafeoto.co.uk http://www.cafeoto.co.uk/

Sunday, 25 October, 7 pm
Opening party
Guest speaker Laurenz Brunner

Thursday, 29 October, 7.30 pm
‘Superlatives in book design’
Round table discussion with experts from the field of book design

This year’s exhibition is accompanied by the 17 award winning books of the British Book Design and Production Awards 2008. Books designed in London can be seen next to their Swiss equivalents.

The catalogue ‘The most beautiful Swiss books 2009 – The present issue’ will be for sale during the exhibition

with kind support by
Swiss Federal Office of Culture, Bern
Swiss Cultural Fund in Britain, London

For further information and programme details, please visit:
www.helveticcentre.ch

Title: Aurélien Froment - Froebel Suite
Location: Gasworks
Start Time: 18:30
Date: 2009-07-07

Aurélien Froment, Werner Herzog (detail), 2002, Scale model, mixed media, 75 x 200 x 160 cm, Collections Fonds national d’art contemporain, Paris

9th July 2009 - 16th August 2009

Private view: Wednesday 8 July 2009, 6.30-9pm

Froebel Suite, Aurélien Froment’s first solo exhibition in a UK public space, continues the artist’s ongoing reflection on the function and semantic power of images.

Having previously worked as a projectionist, Aurélien Froment remains interested in cinematography and in how the production of knowledge varies according to the way images are sequenced. This is evident in works like Instruction manual for a 35mm projector (2007) and Théâtre de Poche (Pocket Theatre) (2007).

Instruction manual for a 35mm projector is a series of photographs documenting the gestures and actions required to operate the projector. The work shows the artist’s interest in the process of assembling images and how these become steps within a process of self-learning. In the film Théâtre de Poche (Pocket Theatre), a magician produces images from his pockets which he places in front of the camera to reveal a sequence. He then shuffles them before rearranging them to propose new visual combinations. By introducing this element of illusion, the film adds a layer of doubt to the question of visual communication and its authority.

At Gasworks, Froment presents new works that turn images and objects into the subjects of scrutiny. In these works, a brick, a maritime knot and the image of the boat on the hill taken from Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo (1982) are presented out of their own contexts and dissected in a series of sequential photographs or, as it is the case with the latter work, through a conversation between the artist and Herzog.

Another piece within the installation is Cinemeccanica, a free-standing wall with two windows from which one can see the gallery from the perspective of a projectionist. This piece gives the exhibition a new reading and highlights each works’ function within a wider narrative.

These works illustrate the idea of “education through self-activity”, championed by the German 19th century educationalist Friedrich Froebel, best known for developing the kindergarten model. Froebel, who lends his name to the title of the exhibition, believed that the acquisition of knowledge is achieved through a series of steps, each requiring a level of interaction. It is this process of active learning that gives viewers of the exhibition the opportunity to create different narratives and forms of engagement with the surrounding space.

A further element of the exhibition is Like the cow jumped over the moon, a booklet edited by Aurélien Froment, designed by Åbäke and co-published by Gasworks and Dent-De-Leone. Based on an interview between Aurélien Froment and Werner Herzog, the publication focuses on the image of the ship on the hill, which symbolises Fitzcarraldo’s plot and the myth that has surrounded the film and its production. The booklet is available for sale at £3 in the gallery.

Froment lives and works in Dublin. Recent solo exhibitions include: La ligne dure, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2008); Calling the Elephant, Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2007); A Hole in the Life, Store, London (2006). Recent group exhibitions include: The Way in which it Landed, Tate Britain, London (2008); Word Event, Kunsthalle Basel (2008); P2P, Casino Luxembourg, (2008); The Great Transformation, Frankfurter Kunstverein, (2008). Aurélien Froment is represented by Motive Gallery, Amsterdam.

Title: Johanna Billing - I\’m Lost Without Your Rythm
Location: Camden Art Center
Date: 2009-07-10

Swedish artist Johanna Billing has been commissioned to make a new film which is the second project in the 3 Series; a collaboration between Camden Arts Centre, Modern Art Oxford and Arnolfini.

Shown alongside other work, this exhibition is Billing’s first major solo exhibition in a public gallery in London.

Johanna Billing’s videos reflect on routine, rehearsal and ritual with an emphasis on the fragility of individual performance and power of collective experience.

Her new work is based around the recording of a live performance of dance ‘learned’ or performed by amateur Romanian dancers in Iasi (pronounced ‘yash’), during Periferic 8 Biennial of Contemporary Art “Art as Gift” in October 2008.

The film links several days’ activity into a continuous process, in which dancers were watched by an audience who were free to come and go as they pleased.

Johanna Billing’s skill lies in combining the choreography of individuals with facilitating their freedom to perform naturally, bringing the whole together through editing hours of footage.

There is no final performance, the whole is a collaboration between choreographer, dancers and local musicians. The unfolding dramas hold the viewer enthralled and moved.

Part of the 3 Series: 3 artists, 3 spaces, 3 years, funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and supported by the Embassy of Sweden

Title: Sigmund Freud\’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity & Will Holder in Conversation with Emily King
Location: Whitechapel galery
Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2009-06-11

Title: The Art of Hunting
Location: Café Oto
Description: Régis Tosetti in collaboration with Donlon Books cordially
invites you to the launch of his book \”L\’Art de la Chasse\”
(\”The Art of Hunting\”) published by JRP|Ringier (Zürich)
on Tuesday 26 of May at 8.00pm at CAFE OTO.

Details
Available in French only (Foreword translated)
Hardcover, 216 × 286mm
136 pages
Images 66 color, 56 b/w
£17

Book (Special Edition) and Posters are available on DesignMarketo:
L’Art de la Chasse and The Initiated and the Beast

About the book
The hunter would have been the first “to tell a story” because he alone was able to read, in the silent, nearly imperceptible tracks left by his prey, a coherent sequence of events. — Carlo Ginzburg

Young Swiss designer Régis Tosetti (born 1982 in Lausanne) presents an enhanced version of his thesis for ECAL
(University of art and design, Lausanne), in the form of an artist’s book.

Located somewhere between ethnographic investigation, photo-novel, and initiation epic, “l’Art de la Chasse” (“The Art of Hunting”) overcomes biased standpoints by inviting us to reconsider some fundamental processes related to this practice. Tosetti explores the universe of hunting with an extensive series of photographs produced in collaboration with Yann Gross, and concludes with texts introducing a selection of trophy-pictures written in collaboration with Joël Vacheron.

About the author
Régis Tosetti set up his graphic design studio in Zürich, in 2006 after his studies at ECAL. He came to London at the end of 2007
and has been collaborating with James Goggin (Practise studio) since June 2008.

The book launch will be followed by a slideshow screening and a DJ set by toot!. Accompanying the book will be two posters designed specifically for the launch.
Start Time: 20:00
Date:2009-05-26

Title: P A U S E AND E J E C T A show by Goldsmiths MFA students
Location: The Rag Factory, 16-18 Heneage Street, London E1 5LJ
Description: w w w . p a u s e a n d e j e c t . c o m

Dror Al Kuwaity / Maria Jose Argenzio / Nicole Bachmann / Ruth Beale / Erik Bendix / David Charlesworth / Amir Chasson / ChunTeng Chu / Elena Damiani / Birgit Deubner / Noam Enbar / Rowena Harris / Haroun Haward / Joey Holder / Thomas Johnson / Una Knox / Iva Kontic / Vera Kox / Hye Young Ku / Xinyi Liu / Matthew McQuillan / Alexis Milne / Jasiek Mischke / Jin Hee Park / Eun Jung Park / Laure Prouvost / Mali Purkayastha / Sandra Setzkorn / Ki Woun Shin / Nicolas Vass / Clara Wolverton / Burcu Yagcioglu
Date: 2009-05-08