“LOUDER THAN BOMBS”: Art, Action & Activism
“LOUDER THAN BOMBS”: Art, Action & Activism
9 February - 27 March 2010
“Art that cannot shape society and therefore also cannot penetrate the heart questions of society, [and] in the end influence the question of capital, is no art.” Joseph Beuys 1985
7 Weeks, 7 Residencies, 7 Ways to Activate Change
In collaboration with the Live Art Development Agency
Programme
The Gallery is open to all visitors during our usual opening hours throughout each residency. The artists will be holding workshops and other events, listed below, as part of their residency.
Please join our dedicated Facebook page for regular updates and additional information.
Week 1
9-13 February
Steven Levon Ounanian & Thomas Thwaites “Honey Trap”
The black-market operates alongside an open economy of security products and theft insurance. It benefits the open market to hype the risks, as goods that are stolen will need to be replaced. Honey Trap is a bicycle designed to be stolen and able to record its own surroundings: relaying sound, images and other information about its subsequent whereabouts. Making a spectacle of the crime, this sensational 'gaze' is certainly uncomfortable, but allows an examination of rights to surveillance and the treatment of crime in the media. “Is our use of someone else’s misfortune or opportunism, in our art project, justified because they stole our bike?”
Sat 13 Feb
3pm “Honey Trap” Presentation & Debate
Saturday is the final day of a week-long project where artists Steven Levon Ounanian and Thomas Thwaites have developed a bicycle meant to entrap a thief. Viewing of surveillance footage, candid photographs taken from the bicycles on-board camera, and a discussion on theft in the largest sense of the word. And, if it hasn't already happened, have a go at stealing the bicycle!
Week 2
16-20 February
Áine Phillips “The Lost Runway”
Using the conventions of the fashion show format, Áine Phillips’ The Lost Runway is a collection of specially created sculptural costumes each dedicated to a ‘lost girl’ as a living personal monument embodying the story of her life. The Lost Runway is an ideological space invested with beauty, desire, loss and longing. The work is a sensitive, poetic and challenging testimonial to missing persons, and the lifelong searches of their friends and families, giving public form to private memory in the service of human freedom and the right to the protection of life.
Sat 20 Feb
2-3pm “The Lost Runway”
Using a fashion show format, artist Áine Phillips will memorialise Lost Girls from around the world in a series of costumes modeled as live personal monuments by Fashion students from Kingston University, together with performance artists from the UK and Ireland.
Week 3
23-27 February
Sean Burn “Napalm Perceptible: A Dictionary for the BNP”
“Words are weapons. And I’m in a war!” Andrew Vachss
Racism is on the rise and made worse by the recession. We are all defined by language, yet too often our own voices are educated, socialised, classed, gendered, ethnicised, medicated or otherwise removed. Sean Burn - writer, performer and outsider artist actively involved in disability arts - will create a “Dictionary for the BNP”, by interrogating the roots of each entry of a standard English dictionary. Physically deleting all “non-indigenous” words, language will act as the ‘lightning-conductor’ to deconstruct the absurdities of extremist hate.
Thurs 25 Feb
4-6pm “Napalm Perceptible: A Dictionary for the BNP” Workshop
Language is our first battlefield - too much narrative is conducted against us; in response we will challenge those words of hate and abuse and then collaborate on various written/visual/performance techniques to overcome/reclaim them.
Places are limited for this event, so please book in advance at picker@kingston.ac.uk
Sat 27 Feb
2-3pm “Napalm Perceptible: A Dictionary for the BNP”
Powerful and poetic new work spanning theatre, film, spoken word and live art from artist- in-residence Sean Burn and invited fellow artist-activists Ruby Sahota and Mike Layward.
Week 4
2-6 March
Ansuman Biswas “Present”
“What is there left to give? What do we share now? My gift is the present.” Ansuman Biswas
Gifts can be powerful social binders, but today aid is big business and can be a balm for post-colonial guilt and a lubricant for a post-industrial economy, where poverty and luxury have shifting definitions. Charity can be highly performative; played out in Live Aid, Red Nose Day, Children in Need, and the adoption of third-world babies by Hollywood A-listers. For his residency, Ansuman Biswas will enter the gallery with nothing - no food, no water, no clothing - and remain for one week, throughout which anyone is welcome to bring to him whatever they think he might need or want.
Sat 6 March
12-4pm Ansuman Biswas “Present”
An opportunity for visitors to collaborate in the use of everything that has been gifted to the artist during the week’s residency. The piece will end at 4pm.
Week 5
9-13 March
Stacy Makishi & Yoshiko Shimada
“When I Fell For You I Fell Like The Bomb” / “Sleeping With Your Enemy”
Hawaii-born artist Stacy Makishi and Japanese artist Yoshiko Shimada work independently across a wide variety of media, investigating perspectives on cultural identity, sexual politics, and personal and private memory. Taking two previously instigated projects as their starting point, the artists are collaborating for the very first time. With the legacies of Hiroshima and Pearl Harbour as unavoidable counterpoints - “the bomb has landed in much of my work” says Makishi - they will develop a live project reflecting their shared fascinations with the parallels, ironies and complex histories of political, cultural and sexual relations between Japan and the U.S.
Tue 9 March 12-3pm and 4-6pm
Creativity Workshop with Stacy Makishi and Yoshiko Shimada
Aims to galvanize quick creative thinking in participants and includes strategies for creating text and visual images for your own performance.
Open to anyone who is willing to try out new ideas and walk out into the unknown.
Places are limited for this event, so please book in advance at picker@kingston.ac.uk
Wed 10 Mar 1-3pm
Workshop & Installation
Creating Role Models for Cultural Hybridity - Workshop & Installation with Stacy Makishi and Yoshiko Shimada (A sushi-rolling demonstration by Yoshiko Shimada. Bring along your own ingredients to make a unique sushi roll. Bring foods which are your ‘guilty pleasures’ but which you don’t normally share with other due to cultural or taste differences.
Places are limited for this event, so please book in advance at picker@kingston.ac.uk
Sat 13 Mar 1-4pm
‘The Last Chance Cabaret’ Performance
A collaborative post apocalyptic cabaret that fuses music, installation, performance, film and food, developed during the course of the residency.
Week 6
16-20 March
Prick Your Finger “Murder at the Wool Hall”
Prick Your Finger is a yarn shop and textile gallery in Bethnal Green London that’s putting the rock 'n' roll back into textile and fashion production. Run by Rachael Matthews and Louise Harries, Prick Your Finger is concerned that British textile production has been lost to unethical manufacturing of disposable fashion. By constructing the world's first bicycle powered wool mill, they will turn unwanted sheep fleeces from within the M25 into a range of seductive yarns, good enough for the Queen. “We’re asking the world to listen to sensible ways of profiting from nature without exploitation.”
Thurs 18 March details tbc
Prick Your Finger Workshop
Sat 20 March details tbc
Prick Your Finger Event
Week 7
23-27 March
The Vacuum Cleaner “What Difference Does it Make?”
Fighting consumer culture, climate change, authority and injustice (“wherever it hides its filthy face”) are the vacuum cleaner’s bread and butter causes; Creative Resistance, Civil Disobedience, Corporate Interventions, Pranks, Hacktivism and Subvertising, their tools of choice. But with crisis dictating the agenda there has been little time to ask “What Difference Does It Make?” So for the first time the semi-notorious artist-activist will present some of the projects, actions and battles never clearly presented or documented before. Expect Resistance! Expect Anarchy! Expect Something!
Thurs 25 March
2-8pm The Vacuum Cleaner: “Work is 4 Letter Word” Workshop
Places are limited for this event, so please book in advance at picker@kingston.ac.uk
Sat 27 March
1-3pm “What Difference Does It Make?” Roundtable Discussion with invited artists and activists
3.30-4pm “This Civilization” performance by the vacuum cleanerwith Franko B
Please note this event is for a 16+ audience and will contain some strong language, images and ideas that visitors may find challenging
Louder Than Bombs is a collaboration between Stanley Picker Gallery, the Live Art Development Agency and The Art of Intervention: The Intersections of Public and Private Memory, a research partnership between Kingston University and Kyoto Seika University supported by The British Council.
