Tuesday, 26 May 2009
Overpass/Underpass
A Solo Commission by Ciaran Begley
Private View 16th April 6pm–9pm
Open Thursday – Sunday 17th April – 3rd May 12–5pm
Overpass/Underpass by Ciaran Begley is a response to an invitation by Amal Khalaf and Tom Trevatt, curators at Hold & Freight, to realise a site specific installation in the gallery space. The work is a 1:4 scale model of a railway footbridge based on a Hornby Dublo component from the early 1960s. Constructed from sawn timber and plywood the bridge is usable. However, as it is built to the maximum dimensions allowed within the railway arch space of the gallery anyone attempting to walk over it will have to duck as they near the top, bringing them face to face with the exposed London brick. As a scaled down model using standard construction timber the work asks a number of questions. What is produced in the interface between the very specific materiality of the timber used to build the bridge and the dark, cold London brick used to build the arch? Where do we position ourselves as viewers of this scaled down model of an everyday piece of architectural furniture? How do we negotiate the work in its uncanny but comprehensible form? As it uses construction timber and plywood, materials often used not just in the building trade but also, increasingly as the very materials of contemporary art, this work plays into the language of both whilst being reminiscent of both actually existing architecture and models used in Hornby train sets.
Curated by Amal Khalaf and Tom Trevatt
Thursday, 2 April 2009
TRANS Part 2 - Transient Conditions
Lisa Marie Damm Philipp Ricklefs Timo Schierhorn Sonja Vohland
curated by Nadine Droste and Swen-Erik Scheuerling – initiated by Wiebke Gronemeyer
20 - 28 March 2009
, Thursday to Sunday 12 - 5 pm
Preview: 19 March 2009, 6 - 9 pm
Hold & Freight, Unit 7, Apple Tree Yard,
transient conditions is the second part of the exchange project TRANS. It understands itself not only as a reaction to the first part that took place in
In response to this conception of space, artist Lisa Marie Damm suggested an idea from which the curators together with the other Hamburg-based artists Philipp Ricklefs, Timo Schierhorn and Sonja Vohland developed an exhibition model utilising the specific architecture and context of Hold & Freight’s project space: an expanse of water extends throughout the space and mirrors the vaulted ceiling structure. By entirely covering the galleries floor and subsequently withdrawing the room’s base, the gallery becomes a support structure for other, imaginative spaces and also works as a projection surface. The artists respond to this spatial intervention with works made in various media that merge into this structure and only reach a level of completion in the mirroring principle.
While for the first part of the project the curators and artists from
Nadine Droste and Swen-Erik Scheuerling (HfbK Gallery)
http://galerie.hfbk-hamburg.de/
TRANS Part 1 - thirtyeighthoursandfortyfiveminutes
Sam Curtis, Justin Gainan, Ana Noble Nava
Curated by Robert Dingle, Amal Khalaf, Tom Trevatt
Exchange initiated by Wiebke Gronemeyer
A journey from London to Hamburg with three artists and three curators
Curated by Robert Dingle, Amal Khalaf, Tom Trevatt
Exchange initiated by Wiebke Gronemeyer
A journey from London to Hamburg with three artists and three curators
TRANS - Reply from Hold & Freight
In response to Wiebke Gronemeyer's Trans proposal we are traveling by coach to Hamburg and back with three London based artists, Sam Curtis, Justin Gainan and Ana Noble Nava and installing an exhibition of their work in HfbK Gallery in Hamburg
An exchange exhibition project can potentially display a tendency towards its own neutralization by emphasis on the cut and paste structure of swapping. Trans allows us the opportunity to ask, what is produced in an exchange?
Here the focus is not on the deferential other space but the interstitial spaces and how in that space an idea of Trans can stimulate new knowledge, possibilities and discourses. We are suggesting a curatorial strategy that makes discourse and exchange its purpose, aiming to create dialectical spaces for heterogeneous ideas to flourish that simultaneously facilitate an exchange between the disparate geographical spaces of Hold & Freight and Galerie de HFBK. The proposal is to invite artists, who will ideally work across various media (film, photography, video, text, performance, objects etc) to respond to the proposed journey between London and Hamburg. Taking a coach from London to arrive in Hamburg, we intend to begin the journey with three London based artists, developing a discourse on the long trip.
The journey is planned to provide the basic backdrop in terms of subject matter or stimulus from which the artists will be asked to respond. The vehicle takes on an active form of an office, studio, information point and an exhibition space where the development of projects, performances, conversations and screenings take place. The programmatic organisation of the journey will be carefully considered to incorporate, into its geographical trajectory, a series of peripatetic events, showings, mini-exhibitions and screenings (operating between London and Hamburg). These fleeting, fragmentary and ephemeral incidents will be documented and archived. Once in Hamburg we shall spend four days producing work and installing the exhibition in HFBK.
TRANS - Invitation from Wiebke Gronemeyer
Exhibition Programme
by Wiebke Gronemeyer
TRANS is an exhibition project that embarks on the idea of exchange and its manifold layers on both artistic and curatorial levels. It manifests itself as collaboration between two exhibition spaces, the gallery inside the Fine Art Academy Hamburg (Galerie der HfbK) and Hold &Freight, a project space in East London. The curatorial team behind Hold & Freight in London created an exhibition in Hamburg in February, while in turn the team of the Galerie der HfbK in Hamburg curated the subsequent exhibition in London in March. The project was initiated and conceived by Wiebke Gronemeyer, a curator based in London and Hamburg, who acts as a translator between both parties.
'trans' is a prefix that derives from Latin (meaning across, over, beyond) and found its way into both Anglo-Saxon and Germanic languages in many ways. As a prefix to no matter what it indicates a motion, a process of formation and change, regardless if that is two-dimensional, recurrent or irreversible. It not only indicates but moreover articulates the structure of movement and development.
Taking this prefix as a starting point to initiate an exchange project, TRANS is not only characterized by a simple exchange of ideas and materials, but understands the motion that results in two consecutive exhibitions as a further progression of the idea of exchange. The project not only aims to facility exchange, but result exchange, which means: exchange itself is transformation and transferral embedded in a structure of both time and space that are not only the framework but also the conditions for such an endeavour. If exhibitions are sites of knowledge production, this project exchanges the conditions for this production and thereby shapes its outcome. Subsequent to this initial exposé of the exhibition project both spaces formulated their own perspectives that function as a concept for their individual exhibition at the other space, making the foreign their own. The medium that carries through this process is uncertainty, as the curators exchange their spaces and are confronted with a new context and the task to transform it once more. This exceeds the 'simple' notion of art exchange projects, whose result is that artists and their work find themselves in new contexts. For TRANS this is only the starting point. The way exchange is thought of here is not so much dialectical, but rather transgressive. It does not happen as a result of clashes between social, political and cultural antagonisms respectively through the process of negation, but through a transgression of existing assumptions and dispositions as limits that become subject to subversion.
When programming an exchange project, the role of the curator requires a more constructivist conception of translation, which is as a way of thinking about the relationship between concepts and its new sites of interpretation. Key to this is the translatability of multiple forms of curatorial and artistic expressions over space and time. The process of translation itself is understood as a methodological form of critical reflection and communication. Here, the translator directs the communication between both exhibition spaces and constantly negotiates the many ideas that become projected towards the conception of the two consecutive yet individual exhibitions at both sites. This leads to a production of some level of equivalence, some shared conceptual space, which forces the exhibition spaces to trade their particularities, as they become subject to transferral, translation and transgression. The spaces are referred to as places: two places in two cities, two countries, shaped by two curatorial teams that act out their own ideas, surrounded more or less strongly by the culture of two academies (HfbK, Hamburg and Goldsmiths, London). Those comparative definitions do not provide for much more than tracing their differences or similarities. For the nature of this project, those evaluations don't make much sense, as any conclusions that derive from such evaluations are always already too deeply embedded in the deadlock of identity politics.
In this context, the spaces' own particular identities are more precisely subject to a cultural translation. Insofar as translation is itself understood as a cultural activity it be able to actualize culture as its medium such that the cultural something that forms the point of departure and reference of translation can become subject to transferral and transgression, indicating a formational process and change. Only in this context the idea of translation acquires meaning, which transcends a purely linguistic horizon and becomes concerned with social, political and ideological issues.
Saturday, 14 March 2009
The Night Though Clear Shall Frown, & The Stars Shall Not Look Down
Flash blindness is caused by the oversaturation of light in the retina. This blindness happens at the most densified space of seeing. At night, the dark-adapted pupil is wide open so flash blindness has a greater effect.
The night permeates Flavia Sollner’s photographs. In her recent work, using a long exposure that denies the capture of a precise moment, she sheds the transitory details of time. A flicker of light in the middle distance reveals another world, one with a different time, at once both myth and reality, dark, intimate and always surprising. What is revealed in that flash of light is the possibility to see beyond the blindness.
In a questioning of the ‘original image’, Flavia developed a technique with Polaroid film for this project. As the milky white turns to dark there is an intimacy that takes place between the photographer, the scene and the print. The sense of literal presence of “being there” that a Polaroid gives is unparalleled, for you are with the scene and the image at once. Standing in the scene itself, these new Polaroids can trigger suppressed hallucinations, a reconfiguration of shadowed stories at once beautiful, genuine and scary.
The exhibition was of new work by Flavia Sollner, her first solo show in London. A series of polaroids were shot in Hold & Freight and were exhibited in the show. The Night... ran from 14th – 23rd November then until 15th December 2008 by appointment only. The project was curated by Amal Khalaf.
For more on Flavia Sollner and her work please see:
www.flaviasollner.com
Saturday, 29 November 2008
Frankfurt Goodwood - 10th - 19th October 2008
Anne Lina Billinger
Jorma Foth
Hanna Hildebrand
Simone Junker
Andrei Koschmieder
Paul Wierbinski
Naneci Yurdagul
Frankfurt Stadelschule ‘Dancing Class’ present new work as a response to an invitation from students of Goldsmiths and hosted by Hold & Freight.
Private View: Friday 10th October 2008, 6 – 9 pm at Hold & Freight
Students of Goldsmiths and the Stadelschule Dancing Class were among the many students and institutions that participated in AGORA 2007, an international transdisciplinary workshop about performance and sculpture. AGORA is a project offering young artists, an opportunity to engage in a concentrated trans-disciplinary exchange away from the day-to-day pressures of academic life. What came out of this meeting was an active intellectual exchange between the students of Goldsmiths and the Frankfurt Stadelschule Dancing Class.
In April 2008 Goldsmiths students were invited to Frankfurt in order to develop a common exhibition project in two parts. The first was an exhibition of the Goldsmiths students in Atelier Frankfurt, “April is the Creulest Month” (April – June 2008) an exhibition of work by David Brazier, Sam Curtis, Sara Fernandes, Kristen Lovelock, Eriko Nakamura, Ilona Sagar, Charlie Tweed, Rodrigo Valero Puertas.
The second part is presented in Hold & Freight, London in October 2008 where the Frankfurt Stadeschule Dancing Class, invited by the Goldsmiths students, present their work in London. This second part of the self-run, self-curated show, aims to extend networks and is the continuation of an ongoing dialogue between the two schools, providing a dynamic exploration of the complexities of exchange.
Exhibition runs from 10th October 2008 – 19th October 2008
Opening Times: Thursday – Sunday 12 – 6pm
Saturday, 11 October 2008
For Those Killed in Ambush - Tom Trevatt
The broad theme of this exhibition is nothing. Or, to be more precise, there is both the theme of nothing, nothingness, the void, lack, the gap and at the same time there is no theme. The idea ‘theme’ stands in for the excuse, the reason for collecting a group of otherwise disparate artists together under one banner title and in one show. In truth the theme disappears through its production. Through the production of the work, which make no attempts to remain within thematic boundaries, and through the production of the discourse around the work. The questions raised at the beginning of the process of making this show were more or less “How to do a show which is shifted, or destroyed by the curatorial intervention?” and “How to curate a show that existed prior to the curator’s engagement?”. This exhibition, or part of it at least was given to us readymade. What we then proceeded to do was complicate it with conceptual wranglings and antagonistic engagements. We gave up a section of our responsibilities as curators by disengaging with the selection process and letting an element of the chance encounter decide the inclusion of the artists. We de-selected ourselves from the procedure of making the selection of artists and allowed anyone in who wanted to take part. Some came and went and the project stalled and stuttered but something concrete has been realised. What this something is, however, remains to be seen. What was given to us was a manque, failure or miss in French, or more precisely, two; manque manque. A double miss. The idea being that one misses missing. One fails at failing. Manqeé Manque was the title of the project presented to us and one we changed. We missed this double miss. So, there was this idea at the core of our discussions that we would focus on a lack, or a failure. Yet we avoided the lack by turning from it to our current title. For Those Killed In Ambush came at a time we had abandoned or retreated from Manque Manque, and complicates our engagement with the show. There are a number of registers here to work through. The first question to ask would be, who is it that gets killed? The statement doesn’t express the unlucky ones; is it the ambusher or ambushee? All that is known is that someone or some people have been killed and this exhibition stands in for a memorial for them. But also, For Those Killed in Ambush misses something. Who is the precise subject that is commemorated here? Are all deaths during all ambushes memorialised? This seems an over generalised sentiment, surely the point of a memorial is to name the dead, and thus instil them in our collective memory, where here, they are left unnamed and unnameable. But, also, is it a memorial to an already existing artwork? Or rather, less a memorial, more a tribute. The title is taken from Dan Flavin’s piece Those Killed in Ambush, which is already a memorial of sorts to soldiers killed in Vietnam. In Flavin’s piece the blood red florescent tubes form a crossbow when viewed from the front, and a cross in the reflection on the floor. Acting as a homage, perhaps, to Flavin’s piece, or to the unnameable dead in this most particular of martial acts, For Those Killed in Ambush would be peculiar and not wholly satisfying. Already Flavin’s piece marks out a territory of unnamed victims, but Flavin would regularly dedicate his work to, for example his younger brother David, who died of polio, or Vladimir Tatlin or many other artists (Don Judd, Henri Matisse, Ad Reinhardt, Piet Mondrian (who lacked green) etc), friends, collegues etc. In fact, the full title to Flavin’s piece is monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death) 2/3, 1966, and is therefore a dedication to P.K. as well as to the victims of the ambush. So, why dedicate something twice? Is P.K. a victim of an ambush? Are we making a three fold dedication or memorial to the unknown P.K. and the unnamed dead of the Vietnam war, as well as to Flavin’s light work? And what can be said of the Ambush? A strategic device deployed very often when in retreat or in smaller numbers, and usually in a tactically advantageous location. For an ideal Ambush the victims would be forced into a narrow and difficult to defend geographical feature, such as a ravine or forest path, giving the attackers the strategic advantage as well as the element of surprise to overwhelm the victim’s superior firepower. In fiction as well as films the phrase ‘cut them off at the pass’ is uttered to indicate the plan to stage an ambush. The pass indicating the strategically advantageous geographical location. But also, the desire to cut them off at the pass, to cut their progress at the point at which they should be moving - to pass is to move beyond, to overcome or exceed - is the desire to halt their progress at the point at which they outdo you. To cut them off at the pass, then is to stop them not just before they get away, but before they get the better of you. Pass also, said in French (in a French accent) distorts to pas, which becomes, in English, not. The ambush takes place in the not, the void, takes its place in the void, is placed in the void. The ambush, then, re-installs the void into the exhibition, the void that was removed, or negated (the negation that was negated - this is a dialectical movement). The title then reads For Those Killed in Ambush that Took Place in the Void, the Lack, the Hole. © Tom Trevatt, 2008
For Those Killed in Ambush - Robert Dingle
For Those Killed in Ambush is an exhibition exploring different conceptions of failure, lack, error, doubt and uncertainty. The exhibition does not attempt to present an anthology of unrealised works, as is the case with Joel Fisher’s The Success of Failure, Sam Ely and Lyn Harris’s archive of Unrealised Projects or Hans Ulrich Obrist and Guy Tortosa’s Unbuilt Roads: 107 Unrealised Projects. Neither are the ambitions of the exhibition the selection of works that attempt to directly represent failure (Janne Lehtinen’s Scared Bird) or attempt to define what is particular to it. Rather, For Those Killed in Ambush offers an interplay of diverse works that orient our attention towards addressing questions that arise from these differing conceptions, creating areas of overlap and interruption between them. Can failure be productive? Failure, lack, error, doubt and uncertainty are often held contrary to our socially established endeavours for greater success and self-satisfaction. Attempting to determine or define these terms ends more often in paradox than resolution or clarity. For instance, to strive to fail adequately fulfils both registers, as it is simultaneously contradictory and goes against the socially established normality. In Three Dialogues, published in the journal Transition, 1969, Beckett pronounced failure to be the inevitable outcome of artistic endeavour, he went further to articulate that the artist should make ‘this admission, this fidelity to failure, a new term of relation.’ In Stephanie Bolt’s No Show (2008) the attention to the brightness of the florescent light is immediate; the consideration of the undersized text in the centre reveals itself gradually in increments only on approach. No Show takes its title from a previous realized-unrealized project where the artist placed an advert in a-n magazine requesting an open submission for a ‘No Show’. Through the reference within the title to Bolt’s previous project the work interweaves questions of production and uncertainty, possibility and refutation, elucidation and senselessness. No Show considered in relation to the open submission investigates the productive space within the act, but only when the conjectural possibility of failure has been removed from the process in spite of whether the act itself is a negation of the terms that usually define or qualify it. Contrasting failure as a hypothetical possibility with the reality of lack and degradation of suburban areas forms the basis of Alexander Page’s Edge of Town (2008). The series of photographs depict the drab and dowdy periphery of the city. Places where things become broken and over grown. A landscape of weeds and warehouses in which the inevitable marks of entropy represent both a sign of degradation along with the increasing uncertainty of potential development and urban renewal. Offering a distinct and divergent line from the realism represented in Edge of Town is Claire Scanlon’s I’ll keep coming back to you, where the production and operation of the work causes the direct deficiency of the essential component (7” 45rpm vinyl). Permitting the inevitable self-destruction and the works ability to ‘function’, the possibility of failure becomes a self-assessed and calculated consideration of the work; a reversal in which its ability to last would be deemed unexpected. There is a productive and generative force behind notions of failure, lack, error and uncertainty and the presence of these ideas are essential components not in ensuring mediocrity, but in generating questions rather then providing answers. Without the risk of failure, the possibility of error and a sense of uncertainty we run the risk of entering into closed systems that would become dogmatic. We would cease to test, explore and loose the potential to stumble across the unexpected. @ Robert Dingle, 2008
Saturday, 4 October 2008
Wednesday, 13 August 2008
Friday, 25 July 2008
Show One
Richards Hards
Gareth Lloyd
Revati Mann
Emily Paige Short
Tamsin Snow
work selected from recent degree shows at Chelsea, Goldsmiths and the Slade by Robert Dingle, Amal Khalaf and Tom Trevatt
Private View - Thursday 31st July 6pm - 9pm
Open 12 - 6pm Thurs - Sun 1st - 10th August
To everyone who has a flyer - there is a misprint. The Private View is on Thursday 31st July, not Friday.
Launch Party
Friday 4th July 7pm til late
After months of hard labour clearing out the space it was finally 'ready' to show people. So we had a launch party to celebrate. We filled the space with candles and bought loads of booze. It was a riotously fun evening. Entertaining the assembled crowd (approx 250-300 strong altogether) were a band called Port Meadow and a cellist called Naomi. As you can see in the pictures below the space looked exquisite. The party then ran late into the early hours of the morning and everyone enjoyed themselves immensely.
After months of hard labour clearing out the space it was finally 'ready' to show people. So we had a launch party to celebrate. We filled the space with candles and bought loads of booze. It was a riotously fun evening. Entertaining the assembled crowd (approx 250-300 strong altogether) were a band called Port Meadow and a cellist called Naomi. As you can see in the pictures below the space looked exquisite. The party then ran late into the early hours of the morning and everyone enjoyed themselves immensely.
Saturday, 7 June 2008
Thursday, 24 April 2008
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