Thursday, February 26, 2009

Landfall

Museum of London Docklands
No1 Warehouse
London E14 4AL
www.museumindocklands.org.uk/English/EventsExhibitions/Events/LandFall.htm
6 February to 31 May 2009

LandFall, an exhibition of new work exploring the Atlantic Ocean as natural phenomenon, transporter of dreams and peoples, opens at Museum of London Docklands on 6 February 2009. The work includes painting, collage, sculpture, textiles, music and poetry and disentangles the complex relationships between Europe, Africa and the Americas, through the tides and traumas of the Ocean. Contributing artists are Beth Secor, Faisal Abdu' Allah, Godfried Donkor, Jamal Cyrus, Ingrid Pollard, Dorothea Smartt, Dominique Le Gendre.








Taking the point of 'arrival, the first landfall reached after a long journey' as a point of artistic departure, the LandFall project reflects the artists’ different approaches to forming new patterns of collaboration with local communities on both sides of the Atlantic.












LandFall follows on from the exhibition Tradewinds, the inaugural show in a new display launched within London Sugar and Slavery, the only permanent gallery in London dedicated to exploring the history of the transatlantic slave trade. Co-curated with artist Ingrid Pollard, the LandFall project builds on residencies at Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas and at londonprintworks in 2006, and is supported by the Arts Council.

Museum of London Docklands explores London's long history as a port through stories of trade, migration and commerce. A changing programme of activities caters for visitors of all ages and includes talks and gallery tours, storytelling, drama, films and guided walks. The Museum opened in 2003 and is a short walk along West India Quay from the Docklands Light Railway or ten minutes from Canary Wharf underground station on the Jubilee Line.

Monday, February 23, 2009

GAZWRX - The Films of Jeff Keen












www.jeffkeen.org.uk

GAZWRX contains over 9 hours of films and videos by the visionary filmmaker from his 60s beatnik movies to his multi-layered videos of the 90s - a criminally overdue opportunity to explore the alternative cinematic world of one of Britain's most important experimental filmmakers.

Emerging as an experimental filmmaker in the early 60’s, Keen’s distinctive approach pushes film beyond its traditional narrative limits, exploring the full graphic potential of the medium through non-linear movement and synthetic vision. Throughout his work the immense physicality and painterly quality of the imagery is in great part achieved by his hands-on approach, utilizing frequent cutting and spicing, stop-frame animation.

His moving image work is also notable for its breakneck pace, cranked-up colour and earth-shaking soundtracks. A self-taught artist, Keen has been inspired by cowboy films and b-movies, pulp novels, comics, and 50’s men’s magazines. Using family, friends and himself as the cast, the settings have included his flat in Brighton, the Sussex Downs, and the local rubbish dump.

Now in his eighties, Keen continues to generate resonant images though his copious sketchbook entries and moving images.


GAZWRX is available at: filmstore.bfi.org.uk/acatalog/info_11486.html

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Ingrid Pollard - My Father's Hands - Small Axe

The Parliament Building
Bridgetown
Barbados
14th - 20th February 2009











Ingrid Pollard presents a film portrait of her parents including their migration from Guyana to the UK in the 1950s. Using archive photographs and audio interviews she asks questions of remembrance and how we feel and articulate what is family and home.







If you are a big tree, we are a small axe.” As this Jamaican proverb (popularized by Bob Marley) suggests, a small axe is an instrument of criticism. This is what our journal aims to be: a small axe. Since the demise of New World Quarterly (journal of the New World movement) in the late 1960s and Savacou (journal of the Caribbean Artist's Movement) in the late 1970s, there has not been, in the Anglo-Creole Caribbean, a significant independent journal devoted to social, cultural, and political criticism. In different ways, the agendas of New World Quarterly (led by Lloyd Best) and Savacou (led by Kamau Brathwaite) were cultural-nationalist in orientation. Importantly, these were oppositional nationalist projects, nationalisms positioned counter to the complaisant middle class (or liberal-rationalist) nationalisms through which the postcolonial nation-states in the Caribbean were being imagined and constructed. Both journals sought to think critically against the Eurocentric norms of historical and cultural understanding of Caribbean society. Importantly too, both journals weren't concerned merely to dismantle the epistemological assumptions of European/Western understandings of the Caribbean; they were concerned also to explore the idea of an idiom of criticism that was vernacular, that is to say a practice of criticism that both gave form to, and spoke from within, a Caribbean cultural-political tradition.
http://www.smallaxe.net/

Friday, February 6, 2009

Motiroti - Mapping Identities

5the February - 5th May 2009
Bradford 1 Gallery
Centenary Square
Bradford BD1 1SD














60x60 Secs offers sixty one-minute films made by twenty artists and film-makers in each of three countries. The films deal with the complexities of hybrid cultures and migration, the lines and invisible boarders of nationhood, nationality and cultural identity.

Ranging from the comic and abstract to the profound and often provocative, the films unravel unique perspective, reflecting on ideas of home and boundaries.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

William Blake - Tate Liverpool

Tate Liverpool
Albert Dock
Liverpool
L3 4BB
0151 702 7400

12 December 2008 – 29 March 2009
The painter, printmaker, poet and mystical philosopher William Blake (1757 - 1827) is one of the great geniuses of art history. For Blake, creative inspiration and religious belief were inseparable and in his most dazzling works he expresses almost limitless imaginative ambition.










This display is an intimate look at over 50 works from the Tate Collection and includes a series of watercolour illustrations to Dante's 'The Divine Comedy'
Supported by Tate 08 Partners

Lone Twin - The Age of Brick - The Age Of Bronze