Coco Fusco
Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island

KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin
14 September 2023 – 7 January 2024

We are delighted to announce that Coco Fusco’s feature length artist film The Eternal Night (La noche eterna), co-commissioned by The Wapping Project in partnership with the Sharjah Art Foundation for the Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present, 2023, will be exhibited at KW Institute in Berlin.

Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island  is the first major retrospective of the Cuban-American artist. For more than three decades, she has been a key voice in discourses on racial representation, feminism, postcolonial theory, and institutional critique. The exhibition seeks to trace the profound influence that Fusco’s work has had on contemporary art discourses in the Americas and Europe. To do so, it features a broad selection of the artist’s videos, photography, texts, installations, and live performances from the 1990s to the present day.

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She is a recipient of a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Arts Award, a 2021 Latinx Artist Fellowship, a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, a 2016 Greenfield Prize, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008 and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Whitney Museum, The Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou, the Imperial War Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York.

Fusco is a Professor of Art at Cooper Union. Fusco is the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015). She is also the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas(1995), The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). She contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books and numerous art publications. Fusco received her BA in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), her MA in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985) and her PhD in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007).

Elina Brotherus (Finland), Hertta Kiiski (Finland), Kawthar Al Harthi (Oman), Khadija Al Maamari (Oman), Lada Suomenrinne (Sápmi), Maija Blåfield (Finland), Paola Fernanda Guzmán Figueroa (Colombia, Finland), Rosaliina Paavilainen (Finland),  Ruqaiya Mazar (Baluchistan, Oman), Safa Baluchi (Baluchistan, Oman)

We invited ten artists living and working in Finland and Oman, including two mentors – Elina Brotherus and Maija Blåfield – to participate in a programme of production and exchange in summer 2023, culminating in a residency at the Saari Residence, hosted by the Kone Foundation, in Finland.

During two weeks in June, the artists worked with external prompts to make a new work or a ‘sketch’ for a new work each day. The prompts were generated through a game of darts with three boards and a set of words assigned to the scores on each of them. These chance-determined words defined the parameters for each assignment across three categories: form or theme, place or stage, time or dimension. For some of the artists, the prompts led to the creation of complete pieces, while for others they were an opportunity to experiment and play with new ways of working.

Resonance: Finland 2023 was conceived by The Wapping Project in partnership with Stal Gallery, Muscat, Oman. The programme was possible thanks to the generous support and funding from Kone Foundation, including the provision of accommodation and workspaces for ten artists at Saari Residence near Turku in Finland.

The Eternal Night (La noche eterna) by Coco Fusco, co-commissioned in partnership with the Sharjah Art Foundation, premieres at the Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present from 7 February to 11 June 2023.

The Eternal Night, a feature-length artist film, tells the story of three Cuban young men that were condemned for their beliefs and their creations. It is about the power of the imagination to transcend circumstance.

The film is based on the true story of Cuban writer and former political prisoner Néstor Díaz de Villegas. In 1974, Díaz de Villegas was sentenced to six years in prison for writing a poem. He was eighteen years old and had already been branded as a political nonconformist. At the time, those Cubans who were considered too intellectual, too enamoured of American popular culture, too effeminate or too attached to their religious faith were marginalised and subject to incarceration and reeducation.

Making Her Mark by Mairéad McClean has been acquired for the Arts Council of Ireland Collection

We are delighted to announce that Making Her Mark by Mairéad McClean, an artist film, commissioned and produced by The Wapping Project, has been acquired for the Arts Council of Ireland Collection.

In Making Her Mark, a woman, performed by Scottish dance artist Tess Letham, sets out to draw a borderline directly onto a landscape. As she struggles with an oversized pencil to execute this physically demanding task, the ridiculousness and futility of her actions are accentuated. Filmed from the air, on land and water, on the islands of the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, the work highlights the smallness of the human body set against the landscape it wishes to tame or exert control over. Human demand to demarcate the land is called into question as the performer moves through an ever-changing environment. The lines she draws are washed away by the waves, covered by tides and vegetation, and swept into the air by the wind.

Making Her Mark was commissioned and produced by The Wapping Project, with support from Arts Council Northern Ireland and Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre, and was first exhibited as a solo exhibition at Taigh Chearsabhagh in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, in 2018.

Mairéad McClean works across film, video, sound and photography, using materials from a diverse range of sources, including found footage, historical and family archives, filmed performances and televisual media. Her single screen films and multi-media installations often focus on the ways in which ordinary people cope with forms of control. Whether the camera follows actual events or reenactments by a performer, the protagonists engage in challenging or circumventing authority. Memory, and how and why we remember, has been the central theme of much of Mairéad’s work.

In 2021/22, she has been the Decade of Centenaries artist in residence at the Trinity Longroom Hub, Trinity College Dublin. In 2014, won the inaugural MAC International Art Prize. Her work No More was acquired for the National Collection of Ireland at The Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2017.

Her work is featured in Artists’ Moving Image in Britain since 1989, edited by Erika Balsom, Lucy Reynolds and Sarah Perks, published by Yale University Press in 2019, and the forthcoming Portraits of Irish Art in Practice by Jennifer Keating, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

Bahrain National Museum
Shaikh Hamad Causeway
Manama
Bahrain

Opening reception 27 September 2022, 6:00pm
Exhibition continues until 5 January 2023

The exhibition Topologies of Air at the Bahrain National Museum presents the latest installation under the same title by Scottish-Danish artist Shona Illingworth, commissioned by The Wapping Project.

Topologies of Air, an immersive three-screen and surround sound installation, traverses the cultural, geopolitical, environmental, technological and psychological layers of the sky, building an image of a complex and contested space, both shared and personal, and with a long history and rapidly changing future.

Filmed in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Japan, China, Spain and the United Kingdom, the installation invites us to consider the space above our heads, once open to our dreams and imaginings, as a territory undergoing radical transformations through human activities that, in turn, are reshaping our present and future.

Topologies of Air brings together voices of contributors from across international law, earth and life sciences, technology, neuropsychology, cognitive neuroscience, cultural studies, sociology, art, architecture, politics, theology, philosophy, environmental studies, economics and lived experience who took part in the Airspace Tribunal London, Airspace Tribunal Sydney, Sky Forum Bahrain and Sky Forum Sharjah, as well as conversations, interviews, discussions recorded during the production of the work between 2018 and 2020.

The exhibition is presented by The Wapping Project in partnership with Bahrain National Museum, and is generously supported by the British Council, DCMS and GREAT through the UK-Gulf exhibition programme.

Topologies of Air was commissioned and produced by The Wapping Project, London, with support from Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities, Sharjah Art Foundation, the British Council, Arts Council England and the University of Kent.

Shona Illingworth is a Scottish-Danish artist who works across video, sound, photography and drawing. She is known for her immersive video and multi-channel sound installations and evocative, research-led practice in which she explores the dynamic processes of memory, cultural erasure and the impacts of accelerating geopolitical, technological and environmental change.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, with shows at Les Abattoirs Musée-Frac Occitanie (Toulouse, France), The Power Plant (Toronto, Canada), Museum of Modern Art (Bologna, Italy), FACT (Liverpool, UK), UNSW Galleries (Sydney, Australia), and the Wellcome Collection (London, UK). She has received high profile commissions from Film and Video Umbrella, the Hayward Gallery and Channel 4 Television. Her work 216 Westbound was exhibited at the Imperial War Museum (London, UK) and was purchased by the Contemporary Art Society for the Imperial War Museum’s permanent collection.

Illingworth was shortlisted for the prestigious Jarman Award in 2016.

Les Abattoirs Musée-Frac Occitanie
Toulouse
France

We are delighted to share the news that Topologies of Air  by Shona Illingworth, commissioned and produced by The Wapping Project, will be exhibited at Les Abattoirs Musée-Frac Occitanie in Toulouse from 1 July  to 20 November 2022.

The exhibition, a journey through the layers of the sky, is structured around the work Topologies of Air, an immersive three-screen and surround sound installation examining the radical geopolitical, technological and environmental transformation of the sky since the advancement of aviation. The exhibition presents a restless, often invisible, world and disrupts the idea of the sky as a space where peace and silence reign.

The exhibition will also feature further works within the larger body of work Topologies of Air and is a touring exhibition curated by The Power Plant, Toronto.

Topologies of Air was commissioned and funded by The Wapping Project, with support from Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities, Sharjah Art Foundation, British Council, Arts Council England and University of Kent.

We are delighted to share the news that the film Erase and Forget  by Andrea Luka Zimmerman, supported by The Wapping Project, has been selected for the Focus Programme: Around Masculinity at the 35th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.

From the alpha male to toxic masculinity, the focus program Around Masculinity interrogates the problematic social construct that is masculinity from a variety of perspectives. The curated section homes in on a blind spot in film history, inviting audiences to take a hard look at their heroes by re-reading classics.

Erase and Forget  will screen on 14 and 18 November.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s Erase and Forget partakes in what I would term masculinity ‘under erasure’. Filmed over a decade, it relates the story of James Gordon ‘Bo’ Gritz (one of the most highly decorated soldiers in American military history, and the supposed real-life inspiration for cinematic heroes such as Rambo) and his growing disillusionment with American politics and conservative cultural identity. Masculinity comes to be understood as a destructive form of madness, a traumatic wound, that is both the direct product and casualty of a relentlessly patriarchal, patriotic, and paranoid form of political ideology. Zimmerman’s cinematic triumph lies in the ways in which she reveals the imbrication of America’s hidden wars with the cinematic image itself. 

Writes Anna Backman Rogers in her essay Masculinities on screen: Sites of contestation and vulnerability, published by the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam on 18 October 2022.

Discover the real stories that led to Rambo
as Rambo: First Blood is re-released across cinemas.

Watch the acclaimed documentary Erase and Forget for FREE GLOBALLY for one week starting 12 noon BST, 4 July 2022 

Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s Erase and Forget (83mins, 2018) charts the life of James ‘Bo’ Gritz, one of America’s highest decorated veterans, the ‘inspiration’ behind RAMBO, Colonel John ‘Hannibal’ Smith (THE A-TEAM) and Brando’s Colonel Kurtz (APOCALYPSE NOW).

Gritz was at the heart of American military and foreign policy – both overt and covert – from the Bay of Pigs to Afghanistan, before turning whistleblower and launching anti-government training programmes.

Financed by Clint Eastwood and William Shatner (via Paramount Pictures) in exchange for the rights to tell his story, Gritz’s ‘deniable’ missions searched for American POWs in Vietnam. He exposed US government drug running, turning against the Washington ‘elite’ as a result.

He stood for President, created a community in the Idaho backlands and trained Americans in strategies of counter-insurgency against the incursions of their own government.

Available to watch for FREE from noon BST on 4 July until 11 July

Topologies of Air by Shona Illingworth
exhibition 

The Power Plant
Toronto
Canada

We are delighted to announce that the three-screen video and surround sound installation by artist Shona Illingworth – Topologies of Air – commissioned and produced by The Wapping Project will be exhibited at The Power Plant in Toronto. 

Topologies of Air examines the impact of accelerating geopolitical, technological and environmental changes on the composition, nature and use of airspace. This timely new work considers the sky not as void and free, but as a multi-layered, complex cultural and legal space that is both shared and personal, with a long history and rapidly changing future. Topologies of Air was filmed in Bahrain, UAE, Australia, Japan, Spain, Scotland and China.

Topologies of Air was commissioned and produced  by The Wapping Project, with support from the  Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities , Bahrain National Museum, Sharjah Art Foundation and the British Council, DCMS and GREAT the UK-Gulf Exhibition Programme,  as well as a travel grant from Arts Council England. Shona Illingworth is Reader in Fine Art at University of Kent and Topologies of Air forms part of her research practice.

Shona Illingworth is a Scottish-Danish artist who works across a range of media including video, sound, photography and drawing. She is known for her immersive video and multi-channel sound installations, and evocative, research-led practice in which she explores the dynamic processes of memory. Her work has been exhibited internationally, with shows at the Museum of Modern Art, Bologna, FACT, Liverpool, UNSW Galleries, Sydney and the Wellcome Collection, London. She has received high profile commissions from Film and Video Umbrella, the Hayward Gallery, London, and Channel 4 Television. Her piece 216 Westbound was recently exhibited at the Imperial War Museum, London, and was purchased by the Contemporary Art Society for the Imperial War Museum’s permanent collection. Illingworth was shortlisted for the prestigious Jarman Award in 2016.

Ride (2008) & Stairworks (2001)

From 7pm Friday 20 November until midnight on Sunday 29 November

We are delighted to share this double bill of archival dance works, presented in partnership with Protein and Woolwich Works, marking 20 years of The Wapping Project and 21 years of Protein.

Featuring a provocative duet between Ascot Lady and Jockey, oscillating between aspiration and desire, unbridled passion and respectability, and an afterlife of chefs ‘culled’ during the foot and mouth pandemic of the early 2000s, Ride and Stairworks were commissioned by The Wapping Project, and include performances from some of Protein’s early company dancers, including Luca Silvestrini himself.

This double bill is dedicated to the memory of our late founder and director Jules Wright.

Performers:

Ride: Charlotte Broom, Omar Gordon
Stairworks: Ben Abbott, Jean Abreu, Robin Dingemans, Kristoffer Hahn, Ilkka Kokkonen, John Milroy, Eddie Nixon, Luca Silvestrini, Johan Stjernholm, Daniel Watson

Ride (2008) was commissioned for Turning the Season, a major exhibition playing with the idea of the Season – the social elite’s summer of balls, races, festivals and regattas – and spanning photography, film, sculpture installation and performance. The third Protein’s commission for The Wapping Project responded to the sports aspect of the Season with a duet between Ascot Lady and Jockey, performed by Charlotte Broom and Omar Gordon.

Stairworks (2001), Protein’s first piece for The Wapping Project, was commissioned as part of the Jerwood 10 X 8: Stairworks series, and guest-curated by Siobhan Davies. Eight choreographers were invited to make 10-minute pieces for the external staircase. The works were intended to be caught out of the corner of the viewer’s eye, and to play with the idea of what a dance performance could be and where it can be performed.

Luca Silverstrini’s piece mixes news coverage with Vivaldi’s music and images of young men wearing only white bath towels. Performed on an outdoor staircase, it could only be viewed through windows and doors from the inside of the restaurant within the building. Following its premiere on the 20 November 2001, the piece became so popular (and re-named The Boys in Towels) that its filmed version went on to be shown on screens around our  building in the following years.

This online broadcast is part of our Protein 21 Remix Series which brings back historical works onto a digital stage to help us take some distance with the present and provide a social and individual perspective on society, interpersonal connections and the everyday.

Our latest commission by composer and performer Laura Cannell  a music album The Earth With Her Crowns is out now, marking five years since the passing of our founder and director Jules Wright.

The Earth With Her Crowns is a set of ten tracks improvised and recorded in single takes in our former home, Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, London, over two days in February and March 2019. This is our final project in response to the iconic building that defined our commissioning for over two decades. Laura’s music captures the building’s unique resonance.

The Earth With Her Crowns is available as a digital download and a limited edition vinyl record with sleeve designed by Atelier Dyakova and printed by PUSH, London.

The first 150 vinyl purchases are accompanied by a free hard copy of our print publication Resonance 1 featuring  new writing commissions by Gareth Evans, Alia Trabucco Zerán (with translation by Sophie Hughes) and Laura Cannell, as well as images by artist Karen Stuke.

Standing on thresholds in the archways between spaces and under the suspended stairs with low notes and high notes flying I played in the moment, allowing the sound to branch off like ancient waterways, I was led by the acoustics of the space to sounds that were self-sustaining, free flowing and changeable. Clear glass panes reflected and returned my offerings of string and air, uttered from fingers and lungs.

Tonnes of water once passed through here to power London, and the space is never silent, the sound of the living city outside occasionally entering through porous brick, steel and glass. I found it to be a proud structure, and it was an honour to hear its responses to my questions.                   

Laura Cannell, March 2019

The Earth With Her Crowns

SIDE A
The Earth With Her Crowns
Waters Deep Cathedral
A Space For Dreaming
After You Left
Having Been Breathed Out

SIDE B
Black Sleep of Night**
Someone Will Remember us in Another Time**
Memory and Desire
We Used to Keep Bees in There
Until I End My Song

Laura Cannell – Violins (Octave & Overbow) / Double Recorders / Voice

**with special guests:
Jennifer Lucy Allan – Horn / Mini Accordion / Voice
André Bosman – Suspended Stairs / Fiddle

Recorded & produced by Laura Cannell
Mastered by Mark Beazley at Trace Mastering
Published by MuteSong
Commissioned & funded by The Wapping Project

Laura Cannell

Straddling the worlds of experimental, chamber, folk, early & medieval music, Laura’s semi-composed, semi-improvised compositions draw on the emotional influences of the landscape and explore the spaces between early and experimental music that is rooted in but not tethered to the past. Cannell is an artist whose original and singular vision sets her apart from her contemporaries, whilst her music exists as a culturally vital exploration of the link between medieval, traditional and modern musical idioms.

Laura has released five solo albums since 2014, successfully carving out a unique path with her work, receiving critical acclaim from the contemporary music press and regularly being included in numerous Album of the Year lists (including The Guardian, MOJO, BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, The Wire and The Quietus). Recent projects include creating music for film (EMI & more), broadcast work for BBC Radio 3, “Sing As The Crow Flies” (2019) a duo album with Polly Wright which was The Guardian’s Album Folk of the Month, tours with the cellist Lori Goldston (Earth, Nirvana) & collaborations with This Heat drummer Charles Hayward & Mira Calix, as well as commissions for Hampton Court Palace, The Immix Ensemble at Tate Liverpool, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra & The Zuckerman Museum of Contemporary Art (US). As well as live performances throughout the UK & Europe.

Resonance
Exhibition of new commissions

Stal Gallery
Villa 221, Al Inshirah Street
Muscat

Opening reception 4 March, 6:30pm
Exhibition continues until 2 April

We are delighted to announce the exhibition Resonance featuring newly commissioned works by Omani artists – Rawan AlMahrouqi, Safa Baluchi, Ruqaiya Mazar and Riham Noor Al Zadjali – and Finnish artist Elina Brotherus.

Resonance brings together new works in photography, video and sculpture developed in response to a series of scores.The artists worked with very short instructions based on Fluxus event scores and other written instructions for performance-oriented art from the 1950s-70s as a starting point and an external prompt. The scores included works by VALIE EXPORT, Yoko Ono and Mieko Shiomi, as well as instructions compiled in List of Art Ideas for 1st Class of CalArts, Post Studio (If They Have No Ideas of Their Own from which to Make a Piece), 1970, by the American artist and professor John Baldessari who passed away in January this year.

Our latest publication – Resonance 2 – will be launched during the opening reception. Resonance 2  features new writing by Jen Calleja, Saara Turunen and Johka Alharthi, in English, Finnish and Arabic with translations by Marilyn Booth, Maria Pakkala, Daisy Vaughan and Owen F. Witesman,  alongside images by the five exhibiting artists.

On the personal within artistic practice
Talk & screening

Stal Gallery
Villa 221, Al Inshirah Street
Muscat

Thursday 5 March, from 3pm

The five artists –  Rawan AlMahrouqi, Safa Baluchi, Ruqaiya Mazar, Riham Noor Al Zadjali and Elina Brotherus – will discuss the works within the exhibition and look at how these pieces are an expression of resonance between their lived experience and their practice as visual artists.

The day will conclude with a screening of films by artists Mairéad McClean, Shona Illingworth and Andrea Luka Zimmerman, who we recently commissioned to produce new works.

Resonance is a series of new works commissioned by The Wapping Project, London. The project is a collaboration with Stal Gallery, Muscat and is generously supported by the British Council, DCMS and GREAT through the UK-Gulf exhibition programme. It included an eight-month programme of production, mentoring and exchange that culminated in a two-week production residency in the rural landscapes of central and coastal Oman in December 2019.

About the Artists

Rawan AlMahrouqi graduated from Sultan Qaboos University Muscat. Rawan multidisciplinary practice focuses on the female experience in the Arabian Gulf, the double standards, the thin line between tradition and religion. She draws most of her inspiration from her Khaleeji (Arabian Gulf) culture and the experiences she has had growing up and living in the region. She won the Young Emerging Artist Prize (YEAP) run by Stal Gallery, Muscat, Oman, in 2015. Her work was featured in the Arte documentary Women in Islam. In 2018, Rawan, together with her sisters, founded Makan Studios art school, the first of its kind, offering arts classes to adults and children in Muscat.

Safa Baluchi graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Spatial Design from the University of Nizwa. She works across performance, video, photography and installation. Her work, which draws on her personal experience, explores questions around the relationship between the individual and the society. Depression, entrapment and erosion are recurring themes in her work. She won the Young Emerging Artist Prize (YEAP) run by Stal Gallery, Muscat, Oman, in 2015 and participated in a number of exhibitions at the gallery. In 2018, she curated Disfiguration exhibition at Stal Gallery.

Ruqaiya Mazar graduated from the University of Nizwa in central Oman. Ruqaiya works across drawing, photography, video and digital arts. In her practice, she draws on her experience as an artist living and working within the Arab culture. He works ask questions about search for balance in human existence, struggle between light and darkness, shadows lurking in the depths of oneself, dreams and failure. Her work was shown in Oman and Saudi Arabia. She was shortlisted for the Young Emerging Artist Prize (YEAP) run by Stal Gallery, Muscat, Oman, in 2015 and participated in a number of exhibitions at the gallery.

Riham Noor Al Zadjali graduated with BA in Fine Arts from Paris American Academy. In her work, Riham poses question about the most current global events including conflicts, military interventions, displacement and migration. Her work has been shown widely in Oman. She was shortlisted for the Young Emerging Artist Prize (YEAP) run by Stal Gallery, Muscat, Oman, in 2015. She cofounded the initiative Art with Refugee, a traveling exhibition of artworks by refugees and artists from around the world in support of better living conditions for refugees mostly in Greece. The exhibition was shown in Piraeus, Greece, Children’s Museum of Wilmington, North Carolina, USA, the Human (Art)istic Festival in Brussels, Belgium, as well as in Spain and Oman.

Elina Brotherus works in photography and moving image. Her work has been alternating between autobiographical and art-historical approaches. Photographs dealing with the human figure and the landscape, the relation of the artist and the model, gave way to images on subjective experiences in her recent bodies of work Annonciation and Carpe Fucking Diem. In her current work she is revisiting Fluxus event scores and other written instructions for performance-oriented art of the 1950s-70s. Another ongoing interest is photographing in iconic houses by architects like Alvar Aalto, Hundertwasser and Michel Polak. Brotherus takes roles of various imagined characters, thus bringing a tranquil human presence to the spaces. Elina has been exhibiting widely since 1997 and her work is represented in major public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, MAXXI, Rome, Fondacion ARCO, Madrid, Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, and Museum Folkwang, Essen, to name a few.

14 December 4pm
public talk

Stal Gallery

Villa 221
Al Inshirah Street
Madinat Qaboos
Muscat
Sultanate of Oman

with Rawan AlMahrouqi, Safa Baluchi, Ruqaiya Mazar, Riham Noor Al Zadjali and Elina Brotherus

This public talk is the culmination of an intense two-week artist residency in Oman, which is a key element of an eight-month programme of production, mentoring and exchange for four early career artists from Oman – Rawan AlMahrouqi, Safa Baluchi, Ruqaiya Mazar, Riham Noor Al Zadjali – commissioned to produce new works responding to the theme resonance.

For the past five months, the four commissioned artists  have been developing ideas for their new works through a series of scores. Each month, they received from Elina Brotherus a very short instruction based on Fluxus event scores and other written instructions for performance-oriented art from the 1950s-70s to respond to. The  scores included works by VALIE EXPORT, Henning Christiansen, Rémy Zaugg and Yoko Ono.

The artists will share some work-in-progress and discuss the process of working together over the past few months.

Free and open to all

Resonance is a series of new works commissioned by The Wapping Project, London. The project is a collaboration with Stal Gallery, Muscat and is generously supported by the British Council, DCMS and GREAT through the UK-Gulf exhibition programme.

The Horse Hospital
Colonnade, Bloomsbury
London WC1N 1JD

7 – 9:30pm

With Laura Cannell, Sophie Hughes, Mairéad McClean, Karen Stuke and Gareth Evans

Publication launch with readings, screenings, conversation and music responding to the idea and reality of RESONANCE in life, art and society.

Resonance is resonant now in the culture: implication, affect, effect, depth: what endures and lasts. The sound of what matters. In its latest publication, we consider the multiple meanings of the word across a range of expressive media.

Music: Composer and performer Laura Cannell will perform live on violin and double recorders.

Moving Image: Direct from this year’s London Film Festival, artist Mairéad McClean will show her film A Line Was Drawn (2019, 14min), exploring how our world is structured through the creation of borders and boundaries limiting movement, thinking, questioning and agency.

Image: Berlin-based photographer Karen Stuke will present her work Wandelhalle: After Sebald’s Austerlitz. The work was we commissioned in 2013 for one of the final exhibitions at the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station.

Text: Translator Sophie Hughes will read her English version of La Última Palabra (The Last Word) by 2019 Man Booker International Prize-shortlisted Chilean writer Alia Trabucco Zerán.

Curator and writer Gareth Evans will read his essay Stations: A Brief Diary of a Long Concern, written in response to Stuke’s body of work.

Tickets £5.50 in a advance / £6.50 on the door
Ticket price includes a copy of the print publication.

Laura Cannell is a composer and performer who draws on the emotional influences of the landscape both rural and urban, real and imagined. Laura has released five critically acclaimed albums since 2014 and is regularly broadcast throughout the world including BBC Radio 3, 4, 6Music, The World Service, Polish National Radio and NPR.

Gareth Evans is a London-based writer, editor, film and event producer and Whitechapel Gallery’s Adjunct Moving Image Curator. He is also co-curator of Porto’s Forum of the Future, Flipside and First Light, Swedenborg Film Festival and Estuary 2020. He commissioned and co-produced the essay film Patience (After Sebald), directed by Grant Gee.

Sophie Hughes is a literary translator from Spanish to English. She is known for her translations of contemporary writers such as Laia Jufresa, Rodrigo Hasbún, José Revueltas and Enrique Vila-Matas. Her translation of Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.

Karen Stuke is a Berlin-based artist working with photograph. Since the 1990s she has been collaborating with some of the most prestigious theatres including Gottfried Pilz at the Vienna State Opera, Deutsche Oper, Berlin, Opéra Comique, Paris, the Los Angeles Opera and many more capturing the spirit and soul of productions with exposures of her pinhole camera lasting their entire duration. In 2008, she founded her own project space Kronenboden in Berlin.

Alia Trabucco Zerán (Santiago, 1983) is a Chilean writer. Her debut novel, The Remainder, translated into English by Sophie Hughes, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and won the Best Novel Award of the Chilean Council for the Arts. Her new book, Las Homicidas (2019), is a non-fiction account of how society portrays violent women. She lives between Santiago and London and is currently working on a new novel.

Mairéad McClean was born and grew up in Beragh, Co Tyrone, Northern Ireland and has lived and worked for the past 25 years in London. She is an award-winning filmmaker who has produced work around the themes of memory, identity and migration. She has recently completed a body of work commissioned by The Wapping Project Making Her Mark. 

“Laura Cannell creates a bridge between minimalist patterns and ancient sounds in music that brings together her own melodies, improvisation, and snippets of early and medieval music. The Quietus calls her ‘the queen of improvised location violin.”

Deep Minimalism 2.0 Festival

We are delighted to announce that Laura Cannell will perform new compositions created for her music album commissioned by The Wapping Project during Deep Minimalism 2.0 Festival at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, on Sunday 3 November 2019.

The new music album The Earth with her Crowns was recorded in our former home, the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station. This is our final project in response to the iconic building that defined our commissioning for over twenty years. We are saying farewell and taking its unique resonance with us in Laura’s music and our hearts.

The Earth with her Crowns will be released in 2020.

Laura Cannell is a composer and performer who draws on the emotional influences of the landscape both rural and urban, real and imagined. With deconstructed violin bow and double recorders, she performs semi-composed, semi-improvised pieces which explore the spaces between ancient and experimental.

Laura has released five critically acclaimed albums since 2014, and is regularly broadcast throughout the world including: BBC Radio 3, 4, 6Music, The World Service, Polish National Radio and NPR. Her albums have featured in many end of year lists including: The Guardian, MOJO, BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, The Wire and The Quietus.

Recent projects include creating music for film, broadcast work for BBC Radio 3, “Reckonings” (2018) a collaborative album with Andre Bosman, tours with the cellist Lori Goldston (Earth, Nirvana) & collaborations with This Heat drummer Charles Hayward & Mira Calix, as well as commissions for Hampton Court Palace, The Immix Ensemble, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra & The Zuckerman Museum of Contemporary Art (US).

Wandelhalle
after Sebald’s Austerlitz

Kommunale Galerie Berlin
Hohenzollerndamm 176
10713 Berlin

Preview Sunday 1 September, noon
Exhibition continues until 27 October

The Wapping Project in partnership with Kommunale Galerie Berlin and PhotoWerkBerlin restages its 2013 commission by German artist Karen Stuke responding to W.G. Sebald’s masterpiece Austerlitz (2001). The novel is one of literature’s most haunting meditation on time, loss and retrieval. It tells the story of Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian who, aged 5, was sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents in Wales. As he rediscovers his past, Austerlitz embarks on a journey through time and space, from mid-20^thcentury mitte-Europa to contemporary England.

Stuke, an accomplished photographer in the use of the pinhole camera, followed this journey, cross-referencing information from the book with maps and records. At the crossroad between fact and fiction, she found when they existed, the places of Austerlitz’s story: the Prague gymnasium from which his mother was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, the railway journey followed by the Kindertransport, his house in Mile End…

The resulting photographs, all taken with her handcrafted pinhole camera, are the work of light, time and memory. Elusive images created by aggregated traces of light, they evoke fuzzy memories, and justly lend themselves to both, the layers and recesses of Austerlitz’ mind, and Sebald’s narrative.

In the installation, designed by Josh Wright and Thomas Zanon-Larcher, large format prints of the pinhole images are set to a music score by Billy Cowie, written in response to them in 2013.

This body of work by Karen Stuke, originally entitled Stuke – After Sebald’s Austerlitz, was commissioned by The Wapping Project with funding from the Women’s Playhouse Trust. It was first exhibited in Wapping, London, from 12 October to 10 November 2013.

The exhibition is presented under the patronage of the British Ambassador to Berlin Sir Sebastian Wood.

Karen Stuke (b. 1970) completed her studies in Photo and Film Design at the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences. She took her first theatre photograph in the 1990s. Animated by the desire to capture the spirit of the play and its unfolding in time and space, she used a pin-hole camera and decided to expose a whole performance in a single photograph. Since then, Stuke has earnt an international reputation as an expert on the pin-hole camera, and collaborated with some of the most prestigious directors and theatres including Gottfried Pilz at the Vienna State Opera, Oper Leipzig, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Oper der Stadt Köln, Opéra Comique Paris and the Los Angeles Opera. She founded her own project space called Kronenboden in Berlin, where she focuses primarily on the intersections between visual and performing arts.

Sky Forum

11 October 2019, 5pm-9pm
Sharjah Art Foundation
Mirage City Cinema, Al Mureijah Square, Sharjah

Sky Forum Sharjah brings together experts across history, culture, astronomy and space science in discussion about the past, present and future relationship to the sky in the Gulf region, and wider transformations of the composition, nature and use of airspace and outer space. Sky Forum invites its audience to consider the sky above their heads not as a void but a multi-layered, complex cultural and legal space, both shared and personal, with a long history and rapidly changing future. Sky Forum will provide significant contribution to Shona Illingworth’s installation Topologies of Air.

Artist talk

11 October 2019, 9pm-9:45pm
Sharjah Art Foundation
Mirage City Cinema, Al Mureijah Square, Sharjah

Shona Illingworth will reflect on her residency with Sharjah Art Foundation in the context of the production of her installation Topologies of Air and her wider practice. Together with Marta Michalowska, Director of The Wapping Project, with whom she has been working on her latest piece for over two years, Shona will look at her interest in the sky and what underlines her drive to understand the historical, cultural, philosophical, political, legal  and scientific concepts of this space that is undergoing radical transformation in the face of technological and climatic change.
The talk will be illustrated with a special preview of work-in-progress and extracts from Shona’s earlier works including Lesions in the Landscape, 2015.

Topologies of Air was commissioned by The Wapping Project, London. Shona Illingworth’s residency in Sharjah and the Sky Forum Sharjah were organised and supported by Sharjah Art Foundation. Shona Illingworth is Reader in Fine Art at University of Kent and Topologies of Air form part of her research practice. The residency and the accompanying public programmes were generously supported by the British Council, DCMSand GREAT through the UK-Gulf Culture and sport programme.

A Line Was Drawn by Mairéad McClean 
Double Vision programme
Sunday 06 October 2019 12:30
BFI Southbank, NFT3

Mairéad McClean’s latest film commissioned by The Wapping Project will premiere at the BFI London Film Festival in the Experimenta strand.

A Line Was Drawn (14mins, HD/Archive footage/Super8/Sound) explores how our world is structured through the creation of borders and boundaries limiting movement, thinking, questioning and agency. An integral part of the forming, imposing and maintaining of these delineations is the control over the narratives around them. Through its layered format and contrasting sources of sound, A Line Was Drawn questions the construct of seamless television documentary and news narratives tasked with conveying a particular story to convince or intrench a point of view.

The screening is now sold out

Mairéad McClean was born and grew up in Beragh, Co Tyrone, Northern Ireland and has lived and worked for the past 25 years in London. She is an award-winning filmmaker who has produced work around the themes of memory, identity and migration. Her recent piece No More, won the inaugural MAC International Art Prize in 2014 and was acquired for the National Collection at The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, through the Hennessy Art Fund. Recent exhibitions and screenings of her work include CCA Glasgow (2015), Whitechapel Gallery, London, (2016), The Carnegie Mellon International Film Festival: Faces of Conflict, Pittsburgh, USA, (2016), The Now and After Exhibition Video Art Festival and Exhibition, Fabrika, Moscow, (2017), and Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre, North Uist, Outer Hebrides, Scotland (2018).

A Line Was Drawn was commissioned and produced by The Wapping Project with funding from Women’s Playhouse Trust as part of the body of works by Mairead McClean Making Her Mark. The production of the work is supported through a Major Individual Award from Arts Council Northern Ireland with additional support from Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre and Uist Film, North Uist, Outer Hebrides.

Topologies of Air – Residency at Sharjah Art Foundation

Shona Illingworth completed her research and production residency at Sharjah Art Foundation. She spent two weeks exploring changing relationships to the sky, airspace and outer space in the Gulf region with UAE experts in the field, as well as filming in urban, industrial and desert landscapes.

Shona met with Dr Abdulaziz Mussalla, Director of the Heritage Department in Sharjah, with whom she discussed the history of cultural understanding and narratives about the sky in the Gulf region, and the important role the complex features of the night sky played within a desert landscape.

Shona also met with Fatima Alsamaity at the Mohamed Bin Rashid Space Centre where they discussed the UAE’s post oil strategy to develop space technology including the 100-year plan to establish a city on Mars. They also discussed the wider gendering of technological development in outer space, and the potential significance of the large number of women engineers working at the Space Centre.

During her residency, Shona interviewed Dr Ilias M. Fernini, astrophysicist and Scientific Director at the Sharjah Astronomy Centre. There they discussed the impact of science on our understanding of outer space and the dimensions of time and location, considering how increasingly rapid changes in technology are generating new thinking.

During her stay in the UAE, Shona spoke to a diverse range of people living and working there about their relationship to the sky, including filming in a large desalination plant which, in the absence of rainfall, generates drinking water from sea water, and spending time filming children playing until dusk in the narrow streets of the Al Bustan neighbourhood in Ajman.

Imagining Sky

Children’s workshop
26 April 2019, 4pm-7pm
Sharjah Art Foundation

Through drawing, discussion and filming in the garden and courtyards of the Sharjah Art Foundation, Shona explored ideas of the sky and the airspace with fourteen children. Their skies were busy with birds, technology and celestial bodies. The children were excited about their country’s space programme and concerned about the changing climate and the need for all humans to care about the planet.

Shona would like to thank Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, Judith Greer, Momen Al Ajouz, Reem Shadid, Manal Al Muttawa and the whole team at Sharjah Art Foundation.

The residency in Sharjah is organised and supported by Sharjah Art Foundation. Shona Illingworth is Reader in Fine Art at University of Kent and Topologies of Air form part of her research practice.Topologies of Air is generously supported by the British Council, DCMS and GREAT through the UK-Gulf Culture and sport programme.

Shona Illingworth completed her research and production residency with Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities

Shona spent two weeks in March filming in Bahraini landscapes. She spent much of her time in the desert, an intense work environment of oil and gas fields. In winter, this area becomes an annual place of leisure with hundreds of tent encampments interspersed with the dense network of oil pipes, derricks and gas plants. Bahraini people have for generations spent time there in the cooler months under the wide but now rapidly changing desert sky.

Her exploration of airspace, its accelerating transformation, its composition, and deeper cultural histories, considers the increasingly complex impact it has on our lives. This investigation in Bahrain took her to an ongoing archaeological excavation, meteorological station and once rich fishing grounds.

During her time there, she spoke with experts on managing civilian airspace, long-term effects of atmospheric pollution and the impact recent conflicts in other parts of the Gulf have had on the growing intensity and scale of dust storms that travel in from the west.

Shona worked with young children to see what they thought of what was up there. In response, they drew a busy space filled with many suns, planets, stars and technology. For them, the sky was not empty or abstract.

Through the Sky Forum, Shona brought together a diverse group of experts to discuss the changing sky. For meteorologist Mahmood Al Shargawi observing the sky through the matrix of technology is his profession. Architect Ali Karimi observed a radical shift in the relationship to the Gulf sky from the intimate and familial connection to a small horizontal plane above the courtyard of a traditional Bahraini home to the impersonal, corporate and iconic vertical plane of the skyscraper. For archaeologist Steffen Laursen the circadian rhythms of the sky are reflected in the remains of ancient civilizations and for urbanist Mohammed bin Nasser Al Khalifa increasing levels of pollution present both urgent challenges and opportunities for positive change.

The Wapping Project and Shona would like to thank Shaikh Khalifa bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, Alyazeya Abdulmalek, Khalil Ali Al Haddad and the whole team at Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities and Bahrain National Museum.

Shona Illingworth’s residency in Bahrain was hosted and organised by Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities. Topologies of Air is generously supported by the British Council, DCMS and GREAT through the UK-Gulf Culture and sport programme.

Public programmes accompanying Shona Illingworth’s residency with Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities

We are delighted to be presenting a series of public events in Bahrain with Scottish-Danish artist Shona Illingworth who is undertaking an artist residency with Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities developing her latest body of work Topologies of Air, commissioned by The Wapping Project, which will be exhibited alongside her previous major installation Lesions in the Landscape at the Bahrain National Museum from March 2020. The project is part of the British Council UK-Gulf Exhibition Programme.

Exploring Individual & Cultural Amnesia
Artist Talk by Shona Illingworth

12 March 2019, 6pm
Bahrain National Museum

Shona Illingworth will discuss her exploration of individual and cultural amnesia and how it shapes both our sense of place and how we imagine the future through the development of her major artworks Lesions in the Landscape and the Amnesia Museum. She will outline the process of developing these works and how they have been informed through her collaborations with leading scientific experts in human memory, cultural geographers, archaeologists and historians.

Sky Forum
Public discussion

22 March 2019, 3:30pm
Bahrain Fort Museum

A day of presentations and discussions bringing together scientists, archaeologists, historians and artists to consider the sky above our heads, and our past, present and future relationship to it. Sky Forum invites you to look up and consider the sky above our heads not as a void, free space, but a multi-layered, complex cultural and legal space, both shared and personal, with a long history and rapidly changing future. Sky Forum will provide significant contribution to Shona Illingworth’s installation Topologies of Air.

How the sky and our relationship to it has changed over time?
What does the future of the sky look like to you?
What do you consider are the main hopes and concerns regarding the future of the sky?

Speakers include:
Mahmood Al Shargawi, Air Traffic Controller/Visual Artist
Mohammed bin Nasser Al Khalifa, Urban Affairs/Aviation/Mass Transit
Steffen Laursen, Archeologist
Abdulaziz Mohammed, Botanist/Entomologist
Hasan Hujairi, Music Studies
Balqees Fakhro, Visual Artist/Art Historian
Giuse Maggi, Geologist/Visual Artist
Mayasa Al Sowaidi, Mathematician/Visual Artist
Ali Karimi, Architect

Imagining Sky
Workshops for children

20 March 2019, 4pm-7pm
Art Centre

21 March 2019, 4pm-7pm
Archeologies of Green Pavilion
Muhharaq

Shona Illingworth will also run a series of workshops with children exploring their ideas of sky through drawing, poetry, filmmaking and discussion. Working together they will share their own ideas about the sky in the present and how they imagine it might change in future.

Look up at the Sky public programmes are part of Shona Illingworth’s Topologies of Air commissioned by The Wapping Project, London. Shona Illingworth’s residency is supported by Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities. Topologies of Air will be exhibited at Bahrain National Museum in 2020 before touring to The Power Plant, Toronto, in 2021. The exhibition at Bahrain National Museum and the accompanying public programmes are generously supported by the British Council, DCMS and GREAT through the UK-Gulf Culture and sport programme.

Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre
Preview Friday 3 August
Exhibition continues till 27 October

A new film and sound installation commissioned by The Wapping Project playfully explores questions around creation of borders. What are borders? How are they constructed? What are the consequences of their creation? Who draws the border? What is considered when it is being drawn? In Making Her Mark, a woman, performed by Scottish dance artist Tess Letham, sets out to draw a borderline directly onto a landscape. The looped piece accentuates the ridiculousness and futility of the struggle to translate a map onto a territory as the woman attempts to execute this physically demanding task with an outsized pencil. McClean questions what it feels like to create a line that closes down or confines movement, what it feels to cross it, to go through or to be cut off or to go around and round in circles.

The accompanying film To Be Retained plays with issues of smuggling – as soon as a border is drawn opportunities for illicit movement of goods and people are opened. This humorous, colourful and rapidly cut film takes as its starting point the General Register of Seizure 1867—1934 from the Public Records Office in Northern Ireland featuring previously undisclosed lists of goods sized at the border, the circumstances of each incident and the penalties. The register includes seizures such as 8 Live Cattle, 10 Umbrellas, 4 Pairs of Socks and 2 boxes of flowering plants that subsequently die at the Customs House and are rendered valueless and no longer subject to import duty. The piece underlines the ludicrous bureaucracy of border control and duty collection.

Making Her Mark has its first showing at Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre on the island of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides where the original performance was filmed. The exhibition is accompanied by publication To Step Across the Line featuring newly commissioned writing by Kapka Kassabova, Tara Bergin and Lea Anderson.

Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre, Lochmaddy, North Uist, Outer Hebrides, HS6 5AA

Making Her Mark, a film and sound installation, is commissioned and produced by The Wapping Project with funding from Women’s Playhouse Trust. The production of the work is supported through a Major Individual Award from Arts Council Northern Ireland with additional support from Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre, North Uist, Outer Hebrides.

Mairéad McClean was born and grew up in Beragh, Co Tyrone, Northern Ireland and has lived and worked for the past 25 years in London. She is an award-winning filmmaker who has produced work around the themes of memory, identity and migration. Her recent piece No More, won the inaugural MAC International Art Prize in 2014 and was acquired for the National Collection at The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, through the Hennessy Art Fund. Recent exhibitions and screenings of her work include CCA Glasgow (2015), Whitechapel Gallery, London, (2016), The Carnegie Mellon International Film Festival: Faces of Conflict, Pittsburgh, USA, (2016), The Now and After Exhibition Video Art Festival and Exhibition, Fabrika, Moscow, (2017).

To Step Across the Line
Frictionless Border Festival

A day of conversations, readings, screenings and performance bringing together writers, artists and filmmakers hosted by Gareth Evans– a London-based writer, editor, film and event producer and Whitechapel Gallery’s Adjunct Moving Image Curator.

6 October 2018

1:30-9pm
plus writing workshop 10:30am-12:30pm

Taigh Chearsabhagh
Museum and Arts Centre
Lochmaddy
North Uist, Outer Hebrides, HS6 5AA
01870 603970
info@taigh-chearsabhagh.org

Free, booking essential

10:30am-12:30pm:   writing workshop with poet Tara Bergin (limited places, advance booking required)

1:30-4pm: To Step Across the Line conversations:

On Lines in the Landscape
with artists Keith McIntyre, Mairéad McClean and Ellis O’Connor

On Straight and Entangled Lines
with poet Tara Bergin and artist Margaret Joan MacIsaac

On Consequences of Lines
with writer Kapka Kassabova and artist and filmmaker Andrea Luka Zimmerman

Borders and the Gaidhealtachd
with writer and artist Murdo MacDonald

4-5pm:  performed Interventions by dance artist Tess Letham

5-7pm: Erase and Forget, 2017, 86min – film screening
followed by Q&A with director Andrea Luke Zimmerman

The film is a compelling and unsettling portrait of Bo Gritz. Lt. Col. James Gordon ‘Bo’ Gritz – “the American Soldier” for the Commander-in-Chief of the Vietnam War – is one of the most decorated combatants in US history. The inspiration behind RAMBO, Colonel John ‘Hannibal’ Smith (THE A-TEAM) and Brando’s Colonel Kurtz (APOCALYPSE NOW), Gritz was at the heart of American military and foreign policy – both overt and covert – from the Bay of Pigs to Afghanistan.

7pm: food, drink and music

To Step Across the Line festival is produced by The Wapping Project in partnership with Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre and accompanies the exhibition Making Her Mark by Mairéad McClean.

The Festival is generously supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.

Tara Bergin was born and grew up in Dublin. In 2016 she received an Arts Council Ireland Literature Bursary to write her second collection, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx (Carcanet), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and the Forward Prizes. It was selected as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and a Best Poetry Book of 2017 by the Times and the Irish Times. Tara now lives in the North of England and lectures part-time at Newcastle University.

Gareth Evans is a London-based writer, editor, film and event producer and Whitechapel Gallery’s Adjunct Moving Image Curator. He is also co-curator of Porto’s Forum of the Future, Flipside Festival, Swedenborg Film Festival and Whitstable Biennale.

Kapka Kassabova is the author of Border: a Journey to the Edge of Europe(Granta, 2017), Twelve Minutes of Love — a tango story (2011), and Street Without a Name (2008). Her poetry collections are All Roads Lead to the Sea (1997), Reconnaissance (1999), Someone else’s life (2003) and Geography for the Lost (2007). Her essays and articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Vogue, The Sunday Times, The Scottish Review of Books, and on BBC Radio 3 and 4. Raised in Sofia, Bulgaria, she was educated in New Zealand and now lives in the Scottish Highlands.

Tess Letham graduated from the Scottish School of Contemporary Dance and the Postgraduate programme at Northern School of Contemporary Dance. She has been working as a freelance artist in the UK performing for individual choreographers and companies, most recently including Underhand Dance, All or Nothing, Stephen Pelton and Alan Greig Dance Theatre as well as creating her own work.

Murdo Macdonald is Emeritus Professor of History of Scottish Art at the University of Dundee. He is author of Scottish Art in Thames and Hudson’s World of Art series. He is a former editor of Edinburgh Review. His research interests include the art of the Scottish Gàidhealtachd (in combination with colleagues at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic College of the University of the Highlands and Islands), and the cultural milieu of the Celtic Revivalist and ecologist Patrick Geddes, not least with respect to cognate revivals in India and Japan. He has a longstanding interest in James Macpherson’s Ossian as a point of origin of the Celtic Revival. With Eric Shanes in 2013 he identified J M W Turner’s lost Ossian work from 1802. He was appointed an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture in 2009, and an honorary fellow of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies in 2016.

Margaret Joan MacIsaac lives on the Island of North Uist in the Hebrides of Scotland; between family commitments she completed a BA hons in Fine Art through the University of the Highlands and Islands, achieving a First Class Honours Degree. Margaret Joan works through a multi disciplinary approach, exploring how stories can be told in a beautiful way. The placement of work is important as subtle sensory experiences can change depending on the surrounding. Sometimes utilising everyday objects in assemblage, returning them to their original purpose when the work is completed. Exploring rituals, social constructs, privilege and the treatment of mental health conditions.  She uses personal experiences to create work to prompt conversation. At the moment Margaret is exploring Gestalt Therapy, the concept of the two chairs approach and is working towards an Exhibition in Taigh Chearsabhagh next year.

Mairéad McClean was born and grew up in Beragh, Co Tyrone, Northern Ireland, and has lived and worked for the past 25 years in London. She completed a Post Graduate in Fine Art at the Slade School of Art. She is an award-winning filmmaker who has produced work around the themes of memory, identity and migration. Her recent piece No More, won the inaugural MAC International Art Prize in 2014 and was acquired for the National Collection at The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, through the Hennessy Art Fund in 2017.

Keith McIntyre is an artist working between Newcastle and the Isle of Berneray in the Outer Hebrides. In Scots Gaelic the word ‘Moladh’ means ‘In praise of…’ and prefixes the place or geographical feature that is to be eulogised or celebrated in poetry or song. The Moladh thematic as a vehicle for narratological speculation around geological phenomena has been driving much of McIntyre’s practice over the past 10 years. McIntyre is a Professor in Creative Practice at the UHI and Chair of Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre.

Ellis O’Connor is a visual artist working in painting and drawing based on North Uist who graduated in 2015 from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design with a Master’s Degree in Fine Art and Humanities.  Since graduating Ellis has worked in residency programmes including ones in Iceland and Norway whilst exhibiting her work locally and internationally.  The work emphasises the fragility and sublimity of the land bringing the line, detail, texture and pattern together.  By producing the work Ellis hopes it will give people a chance to connect with the land and respect the nature that is so wild around us, to then cultivate a deeper understanding and inspire others to make a difference.  www.ellisoconnor.com

Andrea Luka Zimmerman is the co-founder of the artists’ collectives Vision Machine and Fugitive Images and was the winner of the Artangel Open Award 2014 for the collaborative feature Cyclewith Adrian Jackson (Cardboard Citizens). Andrea’s films include: Erase and Forget (2017, 88mins) which premiered at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival, Estate, a Reverie (2015, 83mins) tracks the passing of the Haggerston Estate in East London and the utopian promise of social housing it once offered, with a spirited celebration of extraordinary everyday humanity, and Taskafa, Stories of the Street (2013, 66mins) explores resistance and co-existence through the lives of the street dogs of Istanbul and is voiced by John Berger.

Airspace Tribunal
​Towards a New Human Right to Protect the Freedom to Exist Without Physical or Psychological Threat from Above.

21 September 2018
10am – 4:30pm

Doughty Street Chambers
54 Doughty Street
London
WC1N 2LS

Free, booking essential, spaces very limited

Over the last century, humans have radically transformed airspace: chemically, territorially, militarily and psychologically. Technological developments mean that this transformation is accelerating and growing in complexity. There is widening disparity in the global landscape of power, with civilians increasingly subject to expanding commercial and military exploitation of technology in airspace and outer space and to the consequences of environmental change. The associated threats are not adequately addressed by the contemporary legal framework. There is an urgent need for new thinking.[1]

The Airspace Tribunal invites representations from experts across a broad range of disciplines and lived experience, such as human rights, contemporary warfare, new media ecologies, environmental change, neuropsychology, conflict and forced migration, to discuss the challenges and consider the case for and against the recognition of a new human right to protect the freedom to exist without physical or psychological threat from above.

Speakers include:

• • Kevin Bales CMG, leading authority on contemporary slavery and on the relationship between slavery, globalisation and environmental destruction;
  • Martin A. Conway – cognitive neuropsychologist and expert on human memory and the law;
  • Conor Gearty – professor of human rights law who has published extensively on terrorism, civil liberties and human rights;
  • Nick Grief –  member of the legal team that represented the Marshall Islands and took the UK, India and Pakistan to the International Court of Justice for violating their nuclear disarmament obligations;
  • Andrew Hoskins – media sociologist known for his work on media, memory and conflict;
  • Shona Illingworth –  artist whose video and sound installations investigate memory, cultural erasure and structures of power in situations of social tension and conflict;
  • Melanie Klinkner – transitional justice scholar majoring in international criminal justice with a background in philosophy, anthropology and biology;
  • Anson Mackay, environmental geographer and expert on human and climatic impacts on some of the world’s most iconic freshwater ecosystems;
  • William Merrin, a specialist in digital media and author of ‘Digital War’;
  • Zrinka Bralo, CEO of Migrants Organise, national organisation providing a platform where refugees and migrants organise for power, dignity and justice.

Conceived and developed by Nick Grief and Shona Illingworth, the Airspace Tribunal’s judges will include members of the public, challenging the traditional state-centric view of how international law is created. The hearings will be recorded and transcribed to document the drafting history of this proposed new human right.

The Airspace Tribunal is part of Topologies of Air, a major new artwork by Shona Illingworth, commissioned by The Wapping Project, that will be exhibited at The Power Plant, Toronto, in 2020.

The London hearing of the Airspace Tribunal is supported by the University of Kent, The Wapping Project and Doughty Street Chambers.

[1]See Nick Grief, Shona Illingworth, Andrew Hoskins and Martin A. Conway, Opinion, ‘The Airspace Tribunal: Towards a New Human Right to Protect the Freedom to Exist Without Physical or Psychological Threat from Above’ [2018] European Human Rights Law Review, Issue 3, pp 201.

Thursdays 12 April and 17 May
doors open 6pm for 6:30 start

At
The Future Laboratory
26 Elder Street
London E1 6BT

Tickets: £6

Our third series of Kitchen Conversations looks at the artistic possibilities to engage with the world around to offer another perspective on current events, history and politics. In times when television, Internet and social media are dominated by a stew of sensationalism, propaganda and reality TV and peppered by fake news offering an unbalanced diet, we are questioning what artists can bring to the table. Can artists reach out across the fence and speak to the non-converted?

Join us for debates over a glass of wine.

KC 06 Thursday 12 April: Speaking Across the Line

With Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Alisa Lebow, Andrew Hoskins and David Campany
Hosted by curator and writer Gareth Evans

The provocation for this discussion is the documentary Erase and Forget by artist Andrea Luka Zimmerman. The film is a compelling and unsettling portrait of Bo Gritz. Lt. Col. James Gordon ‘Bo’ Gritz – “the American Soldier” for the Commander-in-Chief of the Vietnam War. Bo Gritz is one of the most decorated combatants in US history.
Together with documentary filmmaker and scholar Alisa Lebow, writer and curator David Campany and sociologist Andrew Hoskins we will discuss the possibilities and difficulties of speaking across the divide and engaging with those on different sides of the political/social/ideological spectrum.

The discussion will be illustrated by clips from the film. The film is currently released in cinemas around the UK. Please check www.eraseandforget.com for information on screenings.

KC 07 Thursday 17 May: Dancing the Irish Border

With Mairead McClean and Lea Anderson

The provocation for this conversation is a new audio-visual installation Making Her Mark by Mairead McClean. The piece is currently in production and Mairead will share some work in progress material. The original idea was triggered by the Brexit vote and the ensuing issues around the Irish Border. Making Her Mark uses the poetics of performance to explore the concept of borders from multiple view points: from actual borders crossed, to imagined borders being constructed, to borders torn down, to new ones being drawn. Who draws the border? What is considered when it is being drawn? How are physical borders experienced?
Mairead is joined by choreographer Lea Anderson, a longstanding collaborator of The Wapping Project, who is also featured with a new piece of writing in our latest publication, To Step Across the Line.

The publication will be launched at the event. It includes contributions and new writing by Kapka Kassbova, Lea Anderson and Tara Bergin.

Kitchen Conversations London are presented in partnership and with generous support of The Future Laboratory

The Future Laboratory is one of the world’s most renowned and respected futures consultancies. A leader in trend forecasting, consumer insight and strategic innovation, we give clients the confidence to make the right decisions and investments to survive and thrive in the future. The Future Laboratory ethos is simple: to help businesses make the future happen.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman is the co-founder of the artists’ collectives Vision Machine and Fugitive Images and was the winner of the Artangel Open Award 2014 for the collaborative feature Cycle with Adrian Jackson (Cardboard Citizens). Recent exhibitions and projects include Civil Rites, Tyneside Cinema Gallery, Newcastle, UK, (2017/18) Common Ground, Spike Island, Bristol (2017), Real Estates (co-curated with David Roberts), PEER with LUX, London (2015). Andrea’s films have been nominated and shortlisted for the Grierson Award, the Aesthetica Art Prize, the Golden Orange and the Jarman Award, among other prizes. Andrea’s films include Erase and Forget (2017, 88mins) an inquiry into the nature of human conscience and the limits of deniability, which premiered at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival and in the UK at the London Film festival. Estate, a Reverie (2015, 83mins) tracks the passing of the Haggerston Estate in East London and the utopian promise of social housing it once offered, with a spirited celebration of extraordinary everyday humanity. Taskafa, Stories of the Street (2013, 66mins) explores resistance and co-existence through the lives of the street dogs of Istanbul and is voiced by John Berger.

Alisa Lebow is a documentary filmmaker, scholar, and writer, who teaches film studies at University of Sussex. She is known for her groundbreaking work on first person film and questions of ‘the political’ in documentary, most recently innovating in the area of practice-led research, with her interactive database documentary, Filming Revolution about filmmaking in Egypt since the revolution (www.filmingrevolution.org). Filming Revolution will soon be “published” as part of the new digital humanities initiative at Stanford University Press.

Andrew Hoskins is Interdisciplinary Research Professor in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow. His research connects multiple aspects of emergent digital society: media, memory, conflict, risk, security, and privacy. His latest book (with John Tulloch) is: Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2016) and his edited Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition will be published in August by Routledge.  He is founding Editor-in-Chief of the Sage journal of Memory Studies and founding Co-Editor of the Palgrave Macmillan book series Memory Studies. His AHRC Research Leadership Fellowship with the British Army’s Historical Branch in Whitehall and The National Archives exposed the impact of cultural, technological, economic, and policy change on organizations, archivists, and records, and on the history of warfare (archivesofwar.com).

David Campany is a writer, curator and artist, working mainly with photography. David’s  recent books include A Handful of Dust (2015), The Open Road: photography and the American road trip (2014), Walker Evans: the magazine work (2014), Gasoline (2013).  He has written over two hundred essays for museums and monographic books, and contributes to Frieze, Aperture, Source and Tate magazine. Recent curatorial projects include The Still Point of the Turning World: Between Film and Photography, FoMu Antwerp, 2017; The Open Road: photography and the American road trip (various venues, USA, 2016-); A Handful Dust (Le Bal, Paris, 2015; Pratt Institute New York, 2016; the Whitechapel Gallery London, 2017; The California Museum of Photography, 2018; and  Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2018). For his writing, David has received the ICP Infinity Award, the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award, the Alice Award, a Deutscher Fotobuchpreis, and the Royal Photographic Society’s award for writing.

Mairéad McClean was born and grew up in Beragh, Co Tyrone, Northern Ireland and has lived and worked for the past 25 years in London. She is an award-winning filmmaker who has produced work around the themes of memory, identity and migration. Her recent piece No More, won the inaugural MAC International Art Prize in 2014 and was acquired for the National Collection at The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, through the Hennessy Art Fund. Recent exhibitions and screenings of her work include CCA Glasgow (2015), Whitechapel Gallery, London, (2016), The Carnegie Mellon International Film Festival: Faces of Conflict, Pittsburgh, USA, (2016), The Now and After Exhibition Video Art Festival and Exhibition, Fabrika, Moscow, (2017).

Lea Anderson is a director and choreographer born and based in London who has been making movement-based work since 1984. Lea trained at Central St Martin’s and Trinity Laban and received an honorary doctorate from Darting College of Arts in 2006. Lea is the founder and artistic director of The Cholmondeleys & The Featherstonehaughs dance companies, based in Bristol. Lea was awarded an MBE for services to dance in 2002. Lea was Regents Professor at UCLA in 2014, and is currently artist in residence at the Southbank Centre, London. Lea’s recent work includes Step by Step (2017), a commission by the British Council to create a large-scale, site-specific work on a pre-Incan burial site in Lima, Hand In Glove (2016) – a performed exhibition, at The V&A museum London and touring theatre production Ladies & Gentlemen (2017).

Erase and Forget, the acclaimed new film by artist Andrea Luka Zimmerman supported by The Wapping Project, which premiered in competition at Berlin International Film Festival in 2017, is released in cinemas across the UK from 2 March.

The film is a compelling and unsettling portrait of Bo Gritz. Lt. Col. James Gordon ‘Bo’ Gritz – “the American Soldier” for the Commander-in-Chief of the Vietnam War – is one of the most decorated combatants in US history. The inspiration behind RAMBO, Colonel John ‘Hannibal’ Smith (THE A-TEAM) and Brando’s Colonel Kurtz (APOCALYPSE NOW), Gritz was at the heart of American military and foreign policy – both overt and covert – from the Bay of Pigs to Afghanistan.

From 2 March at UK cinemas including: ICA (London), HOME (Manchester) and Tyneside Cinema (Newcastle-upon-Tyne)

Andrea Zimmerman will be in discussion at these screenings:

Fri 2 March, HOME, Manchester
Sat 3 March, ICA, London
Sun 4 March, Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle
Sun 11 March, Rio, Dalston
Mon 12 March TBC, Arthouse Crouch End, London
Wed 14 March, Curzon Soho, presented by Birds Eye View
Tue 17 April, Genesis Cinema, London
Fri 20 April, London Review of Books

With more to come…

www.eraseandforget.com
#donoteraseandforget

Bringing Image to Life – a  conversation on the hidden labour of sound designers with Chu-Li Shewring and Zhe Wu chaired by The Wire’s writer Chal Ravens

Tuesday 7 November, 6:30pm
Genesis Cinema
93-95 Mile End Rd
London E1 4UJ
Tickets £5

Two women sound designers shortlisted for the 2017 Jules Wright Prize share insight into their invisible art and craft of layering emotions, mood and underscoring actions in films. From field recording in unusual locations to solitary work in the studio, Chu-Li Shewring and Zhe Wu offer a glimpse to the behind the scenes of giving films the power to speak, draw us in and move us through space, time and emotions.

The event is presented in partnership between Film London Artists’s Moving Image Network (FLAMIN) and The Wapping Project.

Chu-Li Shewring is a filmmaker and sound designer collaborating mainly with artists and independent filmmakers. She is also a visiting sound tutor at UCL and the National Film and Television School. Before this, she worked at the production company Illuminations that specialises in films about the arts, then as a medical videographer at Charing Cross Hospital. Shewring is a graduate of MA in Sound Design at the National Film and Television School. Hunger (2008), by Steve McQueen, was one of her first experiences working with an artist. Her most recent collaborations are with the artist Frances Scott on her film installation CANWEYE { } (2016), and her archival film Diviner. Shewring has also worked with the artists Ben Rivers, Phil Coy and Esther Johnson.

Zhe Wu grew up in China and is based in London. She works worldwide as a sound designer and re-recording mixer. In 2010, she received two Verna Fields nominations for Golden Reels Awards from the MPSE (Motion Picture Sound Editors) in Los Angeles and a Best Sound nomination from the British Animation Awards. Wu worked with artist filmmaker Sarah Turner on her two feature films Perestroika and Public House. She has also worked on the film installation The Running Tongue by Siobhan Davies and David Hinton. Rather than creating sounds that simply “enlarge” the picture, she is interested in sound design that enhances the emotion and storytelling of the film.

Chal Ravens is London-based music journalist specialising in electronic and experimental music. She is a regular contributor to The Wire, Pitchfork, The Guardian and FACT Magazine, and the host of Top Flight, a weekly radio show on Red Bull Radio dedicated to brand new club music from around the world.

Read more about Jules Wright Prize

Tuesday 10 October, 6:15pm
ICA Cinema, Screen 1

We are proud to announce that The Wapping Project supported extraordinary film by artist and activist Andrea Luka Zimmerman will have its UK Premiere at the 61st BFI London Film Festival on 10 October as part of Experimenta.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s feature documentary is a portrait of Bo Gritz. Lt. Col. James Gordon ‘Bo’ Gritz – “the American Soldier” for the Commander-in-Chief of the Vietnam War – is one of the most decorated combatants in US history. The inspiration behind RAMBO, Colonel John ‘Hannibal’ Smith (THE A-TEAM) and Brando’s Colonel Kurtz (APOCALYPSE NOW), Gritz was at the heart of American military and foreign policy – both overt and covert – from the Bay of Pigs to Afghanistan.

Filmed over 10 years, Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s portrait is an artist’s perspective of an individual and a country in crisis. She explores the implications on a personal and collective level of identities founded on a profound, even endemic violence. She examines the propagation of that violence through Hollywood and the mass media, the arms trade and ongoing governmental policy.

Tickets available from the Festival website
Public booking: Thursday 14 September from 10:00

Thursdays 25 May, 29 June and 20 July
doors open 6pm for 6:30 start

At
The Future Laboratory
26 Elder Street
London E1 6BT

Tickets: £12 (include drinks and snacks)

Kitchen Conversations are inspired by the Eastern European tradition of critical discussions about art, world politics and dissatisfaction with the state of affairs that happened in private kitchens during the decades of communism. They are pockets of freedom, spaces for thinking out loud and dreaming up the future.

The first three Kitchen Conversations in London are curated by writer and curator Vicky Richardson and reflect our ambition to reject taboos and fixed positions. The term ‘creative destruction’ was originally coined by the economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942 and is the title of a new book arguing for profound cultural, political and economic change. During three conversations this summer, we ask whether the creation of the new must go hand in hand with dismantling old ways of thinking and structures. Political ruptures in recent months appear to be destructive, but may have unlocked a new period of creative freedom where the old rules and certainties no longer exist.

Join us for talks, readings, screenings and debates over a glass of wine.

KC 03 Thursday 25 May: On Ruins, Wrecks and Renaissance

With Phil Mullan, Josh Wright and Richard Wilson

The first conversation opens with an economist, architect and artist each of whom has been inspired in different ways by industry. A screening of two works made within the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, the former home of The Wapping Project, and a provocation are the starting point for a conversation considering how we reconcile respect for the past with visions of the future, and how far we should we go in destroying work in order to move on.

An Extensive Walk (1993) by Josh Wright
Butterfly (2003) by Richard Wilson
Book: Creative destruction: how to start an economic renaissance (2017) by Phil Mullan

KC 04 Thursday 29 June: On Artists’ Response to Destruction and the Need for Unbounded Space

With Shona Illingworth, Andrew Hoskins and Elisabetta Gasparoni

Shona Illingworth’s film 216 Westbound considers the physical and psychological effects of an act of violence on John Tulloch, a survivor of the 7/7 London bombings and its wider social and political impact – as a consequence, John can no longer look up at the sky. Professor Andrew Hoskins, Interdisciplinary Research Professor in College of Social Sciences – Global Security, will join the conversation. Responses to this powerful work will come from Elisabetta Gasparoni, convenor of the Future Cities Project Readers Group.

KC 05 Thursday 20 July: On Destruction and Preservation in Creative Process

With Alia Syed, Noski Deville, Smout Allen and Agnieszka Studzinska

Cinematographer Noski Deville and artist filmmaker Alia Syed discuss creation and destruction in their collaboration. Poet Agnieszka Studzinska, author of Passage, and architects Smout Allen, whose work Infractus: the taking of Robin Hood Gardens, deals with the controversial demolition of Alison and Peter Smithson’s 1972 housing estate in east London, join the conversation on destruction and preservation.

Rare opportunity to see Alia Syed’s film Priya (2011) from 16mm print.

Our next publication of commissioned writing is launched during KC 05.
Pick up your copy free of charge.

Kitchen Conversations London are presented in partnership and with generous support of The Future Laboratory

The Future Laboratory is one of the world’s most renowned and respected futures consultancies. A leader in trend forecasting, consumer insight and strategic innovation, we give clients the confidence to make the right decisions and investments to survive and thrive in the future. The Future Laboratory ethos is simple: to help businesses make the future happen.

Participants:

Phil Mullan is a writer and business manager, who researches, writes and lectures on economic, demographic and business issues. Currently working independently, in 2014 Mullan completed eight years in senior management roles with Easynet Global Services, an international communications services company. Previously he had been chief executive of the internet services and training company Cybercafé Ltd.
Phil Mullan is the author of Creative Destruction: How to start an economic renaissance published on 29 March 2017 by Policy Press.

Richard Wilson  is one of Britain’s most renowned sculptors. He is internationally celebrated for his interventions in architectural space which draw heavily for their inspiration from the worlds of engineering and construction.
Wilson’s projects have generated universal critical acclaim. These include 20:50, a sea of reflective sump oil installed in the Saatchi Collection. Turning the Place Over a commission for Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture, 2008. Hang on a minute lads, I’ve got a great idea, his regional cultural Olympic exhibition at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, 2012, and Slipstream, a major commission for Heathrow’s new T2 in April 2014. He has just closed a major solo show at the Annely Juda Gallery in London, 2017.
www.richardwilsonsculptor.com

Josh Wright is an Australian architect behind London based practice Shed 54, which converted the derelict Wapping Hydraulic Power Station into a home for the renown arts organisation The Wapping Project. The practice has focused on medium scale modernist projects, which emphasised alternative technology and environmental concerns in an urban context, and covered residential, commercial, retail and arts projects. It made pragmatic use of basic building materials such as concrete, steel, glass and timber to underline its sustainable, low energy ethos. The materials were used in ways, which emphasise their essential characteristics, creating a fundamental aesthetic, which exposes their beauty.

Shona Illingworth is a Danish Scottish artist who works across a range of media including video, sound, photography and drawing. She is known for her immersive video and multi-channel sound installations, and evocative, research-led practice in which she explores the dynamic processes of memory, cultural erasure and construction of histories in situations of social tension and trauma. Her work has been exhibited internationally, with shows at the Museum of Modern Art, Bologna, FACT, Liverpool, UNSW Galleries, Sydney and the Wellcome Collection, London. She has received high profile commissions from Film and Video Umbrella, the Hayward Gallery, London and Channel 4 Television. Upcoming exhibitions include The Power Plant, Toronto, and Imperial War Museum, London, and a book on her recent work will be published in 2019.

Andrew Hoskins is Interdisciplinary Research Professor in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow. His research connects multiple aspects of emergent digital society: media, memory, conflict, risk, security, and privacy. His latest book (with John Tulloch) is: Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2016) and his edited Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition will be published in August by Routledge.  He is founding Editor-in-Chief of the Sage journal of Memory Studies and founding Co-Editor of the Palgrave Macmillan book series Memory Studies. His AHRC Research Leadership Fellowship with the British Army’s Historical Branch in Whitehall and The National Archives exposed the impact of cultural, technological, economic, and policy change on organizations, archivists, and records, and on the history of warfare (archivesofwar.com).

Elisabetta Gasparoni is Convenor of the Future Cities Project Readers’ Group, and since 2013 has been a researcher and producer for the international festival the Battle of Ideas organised by the Institute of Ideas. She is a linguist with expertise in Italian literature and language, art and urban theory. She has taught in Milan, Hamburg, San Francisco and London, and has been engaged in academic research on Italian modern literature since 2014. At present she is completing a book about the life and work of Sicilian writer Maria Messina whose place in twentieth century fiction has been long forgotten. Her next project will explore the historical, political and cultural relationship between the novel I promessi Sposi by Alessandro Manzoni and the opera Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi.

Alia Syed is an artist filmmaker born in 1964 in Swansea, Wales. Syed lives between London and Glasgow. Syed has been making experimental films for over 25 years.Syed’s recent works combine her interest in storytelling with a compelling presentation of history as visual narrative. Her unique approach sutures different subject positions in relation to culture, diaspora and location. She was shortlisted for the 2015 Jarman Award and her latest film On a wing and a prayer was shown at the 2016 London Film Festival.

Noski Deville is a filmmaker, cinematographer and a Senior Lecturer at UCA. She is committed to education and training in film, and has lectured and technically tutored at many respected and influential institutions including UCA, Goldsmiths College of Art, Portsmouth University, The Slade School of Art, Sankofa Black Film & Video Workshop, and the London Filmmakers Co-Op.
She has a long established and continuing career as a Cinematographer/Director of Photography, both within the commercial sector and in the field of Fine Art practice. She has worked with many high profile artists including Steve McQueen, Isaac Julien, Alia Syed and Jananne Al-Ani.
In 2015, Noski won the Jules Wright Award for her extensive and long standing contribution to art as a cinematographer.

Agnieszka Studzinska has an MA in Creative Writing from the UEA. Her first debut collection, Snow Calling was shortlisted for the London New Poetry Award 2010. Her second collection, What Things Are is published by Eyewear (2014). She is currently working on her third collection of poetry as well as her PhD at Royal Holloway; ‘The house a shelter for imaginings” – The Poetics of Literary Home-Making in Poetry: Home in Poetry and Poetry as Home.

Smout Allen
Mark Smout — Professor of Architecture and Landscape Furtures, and Laura Allen — Professor of Architecture and Augmented Landscapes are based at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.
Their work takes two routes, architectural competitions, where the particular rigour of the competition brief, site and program provide the basis for new investigations and, conceptual design projects which test out the agenda and methodology of the design research practice. They focus on the dynamic relationship between the natural and the man made and how this can be revealed to enhance the experience of the architectural landscape.

Screening & Conversation

at
Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Art Centre
Lochmaddy
Isle of North Uist
Outer Hebrides
HS6 5AA
Scotland

Friday 16 June 7pm
Free

For a very long time, The Wapping Project worked with a place central to its commissioning, the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station. All the works were in dialogue with the unique and powerful space in which they presented themselves to the world. As an audience, you had to take courage to step down into an often dark cellar-like space where the magic of the building and the artworks worked in synergy.

 We were haunted by the rich texture of a rescued industrial ruin with visible marks of its past. We worked within it producing work that connected with it literally through hooks, bolts and brackets, as well as through concepts and metaphors. Eventually, we absorbed the building into ourselves and no longer needed its physicality to work in its spirit.

 On Place, Ruins and Memory brings together a selection of works from The Wapping Project’s extensive archives, as well as two pieces by artists recently commissioned to produce new works that are currently in development. The programme includes works by Richard Wilson, Luca Silvestrini & Bettina Strickler, Shona Illingworth, Marta Michalowska and Mairead McClean.

 Join the co-directors of The Wapping Project for an evening of screenings and a conversation about the history and future of this unique cultural organisation set up by the late theatre director Jules Wright outside mainstream arts funding structures.

The Wapping Project launches its new international platform for debate about art, politics, economy, history and science… and anything that needs the attention of a Kitchen Conversation.

The conversations are inspired by the Eastern European tradition of critical discussions about art, world politics and dissatisfaction with the state of affairs that happened in private kitchens during the decades of communism. They are pockets of freedom, spaces for thinking out loud and dreaming up the future.

The first kitchen conversation will take place in San Francisco. London events will start in May 2017.

Kitchen Conversation San Francisco 01: Shifting Ground

Wed the 29th March 2017, 7pm

Timken Lecture Hall
California College of the Arts
1111 8th Street
San Francisco
CA 94107

Free, booking essential by email: kc-sf@thewappingproject.org

The hour-long screening brings together films by five women artists working on the intersection of personal and political. Coming from very different backgrounds and places, they find a poetic response to the very world they inhabit — the places, the time, the memory, the present and the past — Gdansk, Glasgow, County Tyrone and London.

The programme is a journey through geography, time and memory. From the Gdansk Shipyard in Poland, where the downfall of communism began, through snow clad European landscapes about to shift, through childhood memories of Glasgow, Scotland, and a family home in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, during the Troubles, to London in the face of terrorism.

Featuring film work by Meghana Bisineer, Shona Illingworth, Mairéad McClean, Marta Michalowska and Alia Syed.

The screening will be followed by a discussion moderated by writer and curator Karen Fiss with artists Jeanne C. Finley, Lynn Marie Kirby and Meghana Bisineer, and The Wapping Project’s director Marta Michalowska.

in Association with
Bay Area Women in Contemporary Art (WICAN)
+
California College of the Arts

Installation by Marta Michalowska featuring a triptych of films:
Without Reflection, Without Shadow and Without.

On show at Kronenboden, Schwedenstrasse 16, 13357 Berlin.

In the triptych of films set in an empty room surrounded by trees and fallen leaves spilling from the screen, Marta Michalowska takes us on a journey through the landscapes of northern Poland and the internal landscapes marked by mourning. We follow a solitary woman to a score by British composer Billy Cowie.

The work was prompted by the powerful image of a claustrophobic house enveloped in grief with all its mirrors covered by white sheets, preventing a tormented soul endlessly bouncing between them. The image provoked an exploration of death and loss. The triptych is a meditation on grief.

Without Reflection and Without Shadow were commissioned by The Wapping Project for the exhibition Undiscovered Landscapes at its now former home, Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, in 2011. The complete triptych of films premiered at the Whitechapel Gallery in September 2016.

Our first project supported through The Wapping Project Commissions will premiere at this year’s Berlinale in the Panorama Dokumente section.

Premiere: Saturday 11 Feb, 8pm, CineStar 7

Further Screenings: 
Sunday 12 Feb, 2:30pm, CineStar 7
Monday 13 Feb, 10pm, Zoo Palast 2
Friday 17 Feb, 5pm, International

The advance ticket sales start on Monday, February 6 at 10.00 am (CET).
For tickets, please check the Berlinale website

Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s feature documentary is a portrait of Bo Gritz. Lt. Col. James Gordon ‘Bo’ Gritz – “the American Soldier” for the Commander-in-Chief of the Vietnam War – is one of the most decorated combatants in US history. The inspiration behind RAMBO, Colonel John ‘Hannibal’ Smith (THE A-TEAM) and Brando’s Colonel Kurtz (APOCALYPSE NOW), Gritz was at the heart of American military and foreign policy – both overt and covert – from the Bay of Pigs to Afghanistan.

Bo was financed by Clint Eastwood and William Shatner, who supported his ‘deniable’ missions searching for American POWs in Vietnam. He has exposed US government drug running, turning against the Washington elite as a result. He has run for President, created a homeland community in the Idaho Wilderness and trained Americans in strategies of counter-insurgency against the incursions of their own government.

Bo has also killed at least 400 people. Often in the most appalling ways.

He embodies contemporary American society in all its dizzying complexity and contradiction.

Today, Bo lives in the Nevada desert where he once secretly trained Afghan Mujahedeen. He is loved and admired by his community. He sleeps with many weapons. He finds it hard to sleep…

Filmed over 10 years, Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s portrait is an artist’s perspective of an individual and a country in crisis. She explores the implications on a personal and collective level of identities founded on a profound, even endemic violence. She examines the propagation of that violence through Hollywood and the mass media, the arms trade and ongoing governmental policy.

Deploying confessional and exploratory interviews, news and cultural footage, creative re-enactment and previously unseen archive material (Afghan Mujahadeen and proof of the CIA’s drug-dealing out of South East Asia), the film proposes a multi-layered investigation of war as a social structure, a way of being for individuals and countries. In what is becoming an era of ‘permanent conflict’.

Moving far beyond political reportage or investigation, necessary as they are, lies a compelling enquiry into the nature of human conscience and the limits of deniability (whether to oneself or others). When redemption is no longer an option, the psyche needs to find other ways to live with itself. ERASE AND FORGET asks what those ways might be. It looks into the heart of darkness; it looks for slivers of light.

Thomas Zanon-Larcher and Jules Wright

On show at Kronenboden, Schwedenstrasse 16, 13357 Berlin.

In an immersive film installation shot north of the Arctic Circle and inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, Ellida is played by Lianna Fowler, Doctor Wangel by Angus Wright and The Stranger by Patrick O’Brien. The work is photographed by Thomas Zanon-Larcher and directed by Jules Wright. The music is by Billy Cowie.

Shot in Svalbard in Barentsburg, Pyramiden, Isfjord Radio, Ny-Ålesund and Longyearbyen in the heart of an incomprehensible wilderness of inexpressible beauty, this modern re-telling of The Lady from the Sea captures a Bergman-like intensity. The environment shaped the performances, which were played out in the emptiness of the vast world these essentially lonely people choose to inhabit.

The work was first shown in London in 2013.

A book of the work is published by Black Dog and available to buy in our shop.

The Wapping Project Commissions was launched on 21 September 2016, at Regent Street Cinema with a special preview screening of a new feature length film by Andrea Luka Zimmermann and new writing by Alice Butler, Lavinia Greenlaw and So Mayer on Transition, Transformation and Transience.

Wednesday 21 September
Regent Street Cinema,
309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW