Islington Mill

Liberate yourself from my vice like grip. @ Islington Mill,

11 November 2016

The Liberate yourself from my vice like grip. art and music event is on at Manchester’s Islington Mill on November 12.

Presented by Broken Grey Wires, the event comes in support of the arts organisation that responds to and explores mental health. The press release comes with an extensive list of artists and performers taking part in the one night event, as well as a quote by New Left thinker and author of The Divided Self, psychiatrist RD Laing: “Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.”

Artists involved include Lizz Brady, Amy Mizrahi, Jared Pappas-Kelley, and Paul Kindersley, among others, with performances by Mother, ILL, The Yossarians, Shield Patterns, and Andy or Jenny.

See Islington Mill website for details.**

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Rebecca Sangster + Oliver Hickmet @ Caustic Coastal, Feb 17

16 February 2016

Caustic Coastal will host a new talk programme at Manchester’s Islington Mill, starting with London based artists, Rebecca Sangster and Oliver Hickmet on February 17.

The talks will happen on the third Wednesday of every month and, it seems, will weave conversations between artists who have previously shown with Caustic Coastal.

There is a BYOB policy as well as a potluck dinner, to which all are invited. It feels like a nice angle into the current interest of asking artists to reflect on their work, present in front of an audience.

See the FB Event invite for more details. **

Oliver Hickmet, '24K Gold Rita', install shot (2015). Courtesy Caustic Coastal and the artist
Oliver Hickmet, ’24K Gold Rita’, install shot (2015). Courtesy Caustic Coastal and the artist.

 

 

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Apophenia + the ‘Shroom Music & Myco_educational_VJ-set’

11 December 2014

John Cage was apparently into mushrooms. Not only a composer and pioneer of indeterminate music, he was also a keen amateur mycologist, a branch of biology with its focus on fungi. London-based artists Anne de Boer and Eloïse Bonneviot have found a fascination in the field too, not only cultivating The Mycological Twist installation at London’s Jupiter Woods where the artists are growing their own mushrooms, but composing their own ‘Shroom Music & Myco_educational_VJ-set’ extolling on its benefits. Performing the audiovisual performance-installation from one of the “storage islands” in the “co-working archipelago” of  Apophenia, the duo set a lo-fi projection of saturated images, words and instructions to a playlist that spanned New Age, trance, psychedelia and maybe a bit of funk, at Salford’s Regent Trading Estate on December 6.

Anne de Boer + Eloise Bonnevoit, 'Shroom Music & Myco_educational_VJ-set’ (2014). Courtesy Helen Kaplinsky.
Anne de Boer + Eloise Bonnevoit, ‘Shroom Music & Myco_educational_VJ-set’ (2014). Courtesy #temporarycustodians.

That VJ-DJ performance opened a night full of them at a provisional “industrial sculpture and storage park” constructed by artists-in-residence Josephine Callaghan, Susanna Davies-Crook and Gery Georgieva and carved out by equally ephemeral light in the Regent Trading Estate space. Guests invited to perform within the “jumble of assets” inspired by the experience of finding patterns and associations in random data (from which Apophenia takes its name), included de Boer and Bonnevoit, as well as New Noveta and Patchfinder, while Joey Holder contributed three Jacuzzi shells from the artist’s HYDROZOAN exhibition at The Royal Standard in Liverpool.

A DIY fountain made from black bags leaking water and being buffeted by bamboo only to burst on to its audience. A film of an Afghan refugee journey to Greece being intercepted by metal sheets reflecting the film back out into reality. A six-person focus group on ‘independence’ exploring the individual voice and its mass mediation. These are some of the ways the night-long event interrogated the idea of “the way in which our relationship to assets, from property to services and natural resources, is changing in a climate of scarcity”. It’s the first in a series of live events, curated by Helen Kaplinsky and Maurice Carlin of the  #temporarycustodians R&D project, looking to create a “share economy” space among its ‘islands’ of storage.

 

 

“Mushrooms, like every sexually reproducing organism on this planet, can generate a limited number of cell division before vitality falters”, Bonnevoit warns in her live and intermittent notes on mycology throughout the ‘Shroom Music & Myco_educational_VJ-set’. That’s followed by the swelling, bulging and throbbing time-lapse imagery of fungi growing and reproducing, while a woman’s voice sings, “why don’t you lay your head back, open your lips and take a sip” over a tune that can only be described as ‘groovy’. It’s an un-Googleable song called ‘Fourth Dimensional’ by Aquafur, taken from what de Boer calls a “chillwave/psybient/triphop” compilation CD. Its jerky “fourth-dimensional, super-expressional, soul-continual, verging on criminal” refrain prefaces an eventual shift in mood, from awkwardly sexy ‘funkwave’ to angry industrial, as Bonnevoit puts out the appeal, “I strongly believe that the future health of the planet may well depend on the strains we preserve this century”. **

Event photos, top-right.

#temporarycustodians’ Apophenia event was on at Salford’s Regent Trading Estate on December 6, 2014.

Header image: Courtesy Anne de Boer and Eloïse Bonneviot.

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