Come and Walk Together //16 May//2pm//Meet at Alfie’s Antiques 13-25 Church Street NW8

Join resident artists Sam Curtis and Chris Jones on a public walk around Church Street:

The past is easier than the future…who has time to think about the future?

COME WALK TOGETHER: seeing what we see, saying what we say

Please come and join us on a walk around the Church St area on Saturday 16th May at 2pm. This is an invitation to see and say what we can see locally. It’s history, our history and it’s ever-changing, good and bad!

See you there, Sam and Chris

SATURDAY 16th MAY. Meet at 2pm outside Alfies, 13-25 Church St, London NW8.

Walk is structured and guided by all who come.

Malak Helmy: Soft Matter // Reading and Artists Talk // 26 October// The Cockpit NW8 8EH

A reading and artists talk by the Edgware Road Project’s artist-in-residence Malak Helmy at The Cockpit theatre

Taking place at the Cockpit Theatre near Church Street, Malak Helmy will read on measuring, duration and calibrating psychological geographies to places, events that fall in and out of significance through her recent work, Music for Drifting, commissioned by the 9th Mercusol Bienal.

In Music for Drifting, Malak Helmy uses the medium of messenger bird to measure the experience of duration in moments of chang¬ing time. Over a few days in August 2013 the artist and the messenger bird travelled be¬tween locations in the (Western) desert and the (Mediterranean) sea to collect rhythms from places that historically held events that changed the experience of time, but which have, as locations, been forgotten and dis¬carded from memory. At the final location, on the morning of August 14, the messenger bird was scheduled to fly from this geography back to the center (Cairo) to a musician’s studio, carrying with it the recordings collected, and a recording of the duration of its own flight. However, political events in Cairo on that morning would change conditions nation wide, halt the possibility of movement, ground the bird and stop the possibility of flight back to the point to which it returns. A distance of what would have normally been a four-hour bird flight becomes one of waiting extending now over 624 hours.

Malak Helmy is an artist whose work explores relationships between constructions of language and constructions of place. Based in Cairo, her artworks explore the line between private and public, science and magic, and metaphor and switches in signification. She co-founded the collective Pericentre Project in October 2008 who initiated the project Kharita which explored relationships between urban development and artistic discourse in the city of Cairo and in 2012 she co-founded the project Emotional Architecture. Helmy received her MFA in Social Practice from the California College of Art in 2010 and her BA from the American University in Cairo.

Her residency is part of an exchange with Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha entitled From Neighbourhood to Neighbourhoods.

The Cockpit
Gateforth Street
Marylebone
London NW8 8EH

T: 020 7258 2925

Free Cinema School Salon: On Pedagogical Film//Wednesday 28 November 2012 // 7pm

Still from ‘Democracy at Work’ (c) BBC-TUC film archive

FREE, no booking required

7pm

Centre for Possible Studies
21 Gloucester Place
London W1U 8HR (on the corner of George Street)

November’s Free Cinema School Salon revisits the histories of Pedagogical Film in the UK. Hosted by artist, Margareta Kern with artists from no.w.here, see excerpts from videos that were made as part of the television series ‘Democracy at Work’ – a collaboration between the BBC Further Education department, Trade Union Education Service, Workers Educational Association and Sheffield University Extra-Mural department, aired on the BBC in 1978. These television programmes were accompanied by a detailed booklet, and available to trade union members to be used as tools for education, agitation and worker organisation. The videos cover topics such as job satisfaction, industrial democracy, safety at work, worker representatives on the board, role of the women in trade union movement, nursery provision in industry, obtaining information from management and history of collective bargaining. In re-visiting these videos, this Salon will explore how films were utilised historically as pedagogical tool for empowerment of the workers, in order to re-think its current status in the context of contemporary disempowerment of unions and workers.

For more information please contact:
Janna Graham, Education Projects Curator
jannag@serpentinegallery.org

Amal Khalaf, Assistant Curator, Projects
amalk@serpentinegallery.org
Join the facebook page for this event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/550409114986126/

Revolution at Point Zero: a talk and discussion with Silvia Federici//Tuesday 13 November//7pm

‘Continuing the feminist critique of Marx: primitive accumulation, technology and the war on women’ 

A Talk and Discussion with Silvia Federici

Centre for Possible Studies
21 Gloucester Place, London W1U 8HR (on the corner of George Street)

FREE, 7pm

Author, teacher and feminist activist Silvia Federici will be giving a talk at the Centre for Possible Studies to mark her latest book Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle. Written between 1975 and the present, the essays collected in Revolution at Point Zero represent nearly forty years of research and theorizing on questions of social reproduction and the transformations which the globalization process has produced. Originally inspired by Federici’s organizational work in the Wages For Housework movement, topics discussed include the international restructuring of reproductive work and its effects on the sexual division of labour, the globalization of care work and sex work, the crisis of elder care, and the development of affective labour.

Silvia Federici is one of the cofounders of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the international campaign for Wages for Housework. Federici has been instrumental in developing the concept of “reproduction” as a key to class relations of exploitation and domination in local and global contexts, and as central to forms of autonomy and the commons. Her decades of research and political organizing accompanies a long list of publications on philosophy and feminist theory, women’s history, education, culture, international politics, the worldwide struggle against capitalist globalization and for a feminist reconstruction of the commons. She is also a contributor to the upcoming Serpentine Projects book Art + Care: A Future.

This talk is organised in collaboration with PM Press.

For more information:
Janna Graham, Education Projects Curator
+44 (0)20 7298 1535
jannag@serpentinegallery.org

Amal Khalaf, Assistant Curator, Projects
+44 (0)20 7723 3162
amalk@serpentinegallery.org

Free Cinema School Salon: A Biased History of Political Theatre, 25/2/12, 5-7pm

(c) Banner Theatre

Free Cinema School Salon: A Biased History of Political Theatre

 

with Frances Rifkin and Dave Rogers

Saturday 25 February 2012, 5-7pm
Centre for Possible Studies
21 Gloucester Place, London, W1U 8HR

Free

In residence at the Centre for Possible Studies are theatre director Frances Rifkin, members of no.w.here collective, Karen Mirza and Brad Butler in collaboration with the Migrant Resource Centre and Implicated Theatre, exploring the relationship between political speech and action through a series of experimental theatre workshops.

This Free Cinema School Salon, Frances Rifkin (Utopia Arts) and Dave Rogers (Banner Theatre) will be visiting histories of political theatre in the UK.

See more information here:

Banner Theatre: http://www.bannertheatre.co.uk

Frances Rifkin, artistic director of Utopia Arts is a cultural worker and director in Political and Community theatre. In the 1970s she was director of Recreation Ground Theatre Company and in the 1980s she was director of Banner Theatre, Birmingham and participated as a theatre activist in the anti-fascist movements, disputes and strikes of the time. She trained extensively with Augusto Boal in the early 1990s and worked as a workshop leader. Between 1992 and 1997, she was lecturer in Community and workshop theatre in Theatre Studies at Warwick and Lancaster Universities.

Dave Rogers, artistic director of Banner Theatre, was a founder member of Banner in 1973. He has written many of the company’s songs and written or co-written several shows, including Free for All(1999/2000), Black and White in the Red (2000/2), Migrant Voices (2002/3), Wild Geese (2005/6) and “They get free mobiles…don’t they?” (2007/8). Dave, whose musical roots are in the English folk revival of the 1960s/1970s, has recorded many of Banner’s songs.

More on Direct Speech Acts

 

Initiated as part Karen Mirza and Brad Butler’s residency with the Edgware Road Project, Direct Speech Acts has developed into nine months of intensive theatre workshops, performances and research at the Centre for Possible Studies. Led by theatre director Frances Rifkin, the experimental workshops explore the relationships between political speech and action, the self and the collective, voice and silence. The group involved in the project has come together through the close working relationship of the Centre for Possible Studies and the Migrant Resource Centre.

The theoretical basis for this practice is the work of the Brazilian director Augusto Boal (1931-2009). Boal’s conception of the ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ explicitly challenges the divisions between active and passive states or subjects. In his work, Boal argues that we are all spect-actors – spectators and actors who shape and reflect on the world around us. Influenced by thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and the pedagogue Paolo Freire, Boal travelled internationally to explore the situations of the oprimido – the oppressed – who, Boal stresses, should not refer to the condition of being defeated, being victims, but of a struggle against oppression.

At the Centre for Possible Studies, these workshops have led onto the development of a theatre collective, titled ‘Implicated Theatre’, as well as a growing archive of writing, still and moving images, and performances in community spaces such as the Migrant Resource Centre. Implicated Theatre have collectively created an ethical stage – a shared space to explore the ghosts of history and politics. Initially focused on the personal, Implicated Theatre have developed relationships and techniques which support investigations into the grand narratives that shape its participants lives.

Members of Implicated Theatre include director Frances Rifkin with Carlo Bellanova, Monika Burzykowska, Brad Butler, Simin Cox, Janna Graham, Karem Ibrahim, Yemane Kassa, Amal Khalaf, Grace Kyne-Lilley, Tatsiana Lizahle, Elizabeth Mahlanze, Laura Marziale, Karen Mirza, Liudmila Novikova, Luca Pieri, Qing Ren, Edelquinn Neri Santiago, Enrico Sibour and Rafael Zamuriano

Coming up

On the Edgware Road
6 – 28 March 2012

 

On the Edgware Road makes public three years of research generated by the Serpentine’s Edgware Road Project. The exhibition includes installations, films and performances, both at the Serpentine Gallery and at the Centre for Possible Studies, the Project’s home.

From our archive: Shaabi-Music-Wedding-Dance-Party, the Bidoun Library Park Night

Last July, we were treated to an amazing performance from Sadat who flew straight from Madinet El-Salam, Cairo to fill this year’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, the hortus conclusus (a contemplative room, a garden within a garden) with the impossible-not-to dance-to Egyptian Sha3by music, with DJ Funkyeast…

 For those who missed it, see here: http://vimeo.com/28656589

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Special thanks goes to the amazing Sadat, DJ Funkyeast (See Eastern Tempatations at Darbucka Club, London), Noov El Senary, Yasmine El Rashidi and all the Bidoun Team!

All photos (c) Polly Bradden

 

Free Cinema School Salon with Emily Wardill, Wed 4 May 2011, 7pm

Salon at the Centre for Possible Studies with Emily Wardill

Event is free

7pm

64 Seymour Street, W1H 5BW

As part of her residency at the Centre for Possible Studies, London-based artist Emily Wardill will show past work and excerpts of films that are influencing her current process. Wardill is collaborating with people from London’s Migrant Resource Centre through workshops that explore the use of melodrama in the process of making and question of how the making of a film can open up political processes for all those involved. The workshops are in preparation for a feature film by Wardill that has been co-commissioned by If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution, Amsterdam, Serpentine Gallery, London, and Film London’s FLAMIN, co-produced with City Projects and supported by M HKA, Antwerp and Badischer Kunstverein.

http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2011/01/free_cinema_school_emily_wardill.html

Nancy Spero Conference, 15 April 2011

Nancy Spero: A Conference
15 April

Hochhauser Auditorium
Victoria & Albert Museum
Cromwell Road
London SW7 2RL

11am – 5pm

The Serpentine Gallery presents this conference on the occasion of their current exhibition of the celebrated American artist Nancy Spero, the first major presentation following her death in autumn 2009.

Artists, academics and curators, including Jon Bird, Clayton Eshleman, Margaret Harrison, Hans Ulrich-Obrist, Gill Perry, Olivia Plender, Lisa Tickner and Monica Ross, gather to discuss and celebrate the work of Nancy Spero and its relationship to feminism, literature, philosophy and theatre, specifically focusing on the distinctive understanding of the relationship between Nancy Spero’s work and that of Artaud. Documentary films of the artist made by Irene Sosa over the past 15 years will be screened throughout the conference.

Artist and activist Nancy Spero (1926–2009) was a leading pioneer of feminist art. During her 50-year career, she created a vibrant visual language constructed from the histories and mythologies of past and present cultures.

Free Cinema School Salon hosted by Wael Shawky- 6th April 2011, 7pm

 

Still from Shawky's Cabaret crusades: The Horror Show File (2010)

Free Cinema School Salon, Wednesday 6th April, 7-9pm

64 Seymour Street, London W1H 5BW

Free

April’s Free Cinema School Salon will be hosted by resident artist, Wael Shawky.  Wael will be presenting a selection of films from Egypt,  a discussion will follow.

We are really excited to have Wael  in residence this month and hope that you can join us for this evening event.

Associated Event:

Artist Talk: Wael Shawky

Friday 8 April 2011, 6.30pm
Delfina Foundation

29 Catherine Place, SW1E 6DY

Free event. To book, please email rsvp@delfinafoundation.com

(Please see: http://www.delfinafoundation.com/)

Wael Shawky lives and works in Alexandria, Egypt.  Last year he launched MASS Alexandria, the first Independent Studio Program for young artists in Alexandria, Egypt, Shawky has received international acclaim for his work as an artist and filmmaker.  Shawky has held solo shows internationally, including the Citta Dell’Arte, Italy (2010), Gentili Apri, Berlin (2009), the Kunsthalle Winterthur, Switzerland (2007), and Ludwigsburg Kunstverein in Germany (2005) as well as presenting work at the Venice Biennale (2003, 2005).  In February 2011, he was awarded the Ernst Schering Foundation Art Award .  From 15th April 2011, you can see Wael Shawky’s work at Nottingham Contemporary (http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/art/wael-shawky)

His residency with the Edgware Road Project will be undertaken in two parts, April 2011 and then in Summer 2011.  His residency is in collaboration with the Townhouse Gallery, Cairo and the Delfina Foundation, London.

Susan Hefuna in Cairo and London

Sunday 5 December – Sunday 13 February

At the Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, the Serpentine Gallery and the Centre for Possible Studies, London

The Serpentine Gallery in London and Townhouse Gallery present new works by artist Susan Hefuna as part of an ongoing exchange between London and Cairo.  Produced as part of the Serpentine Gallery’s Edgware Road Project, Hefuna has created a series of video portraits of the Edgware Road.  These works will be screened in the Antikana neighbourhood surrounding Townhouse Gallery in Cairo at the same time as they appear in the Serpentine Gallery Lobby and at the Centre for Possible Studies, home to the Edgware Road Project.  Hefuna, whose work frequently moves between worlds, has also created a set of limited edition postcards to be sent between the two cities. The exchange is part of Vice Versa: Exchanges Between London and Cairo, a series of collaborations between the Serpentine Gallery’s Edgware Road Project and partners at Townhouse Gallery.