Acclaimed contemporary visual artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art in the School of Music and Fine Art, Adam Chodzko, is preparing to open Design for a Fold at the Sidney Cooper Gallery. Funded by the Arts Council England and The Elephant Trust, it is a new installation incorporating many of Chodzko’s works made locally since his move to Kent in 2001.
Mapping his particular engagement with places, times and communities around where he lives and works in Whitstable, the exhibition seeks to root, or fold, the idea of the local within another, apparently remote, alien and distant place; Beppu, Japan. It will expand, compress and twist an understanding of Kent into a new form, questioning who, what, when and where we might be within its landscape and communities.
Chodzko’s art explores the interactions and possibilities of human behaviour. Exhibiting internationally since 1991, Chodzko works across media, from video installation to subtle interventions, with a practice that is situated both within the gallery and the wider public realm.
After studying the History of Art at the University of Manchester and Fine Art as a Masters at Goldsmiths College London, Chodzko has exhibited at numerous venues around the world. These include the Tate Britain, Venice Biennale, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Istanbul Biennial and locally at the Folkestone Triennial.
Adam Chodzko has been shortlisted for the prestigious Jarman Award.
Design for a Fold opens at the Sidney Cooper Gallery on Thursday 15 October with an exclusive evening with Adam Chodzko and Dr. Andy Birtwistle, Director of The Centre for Practice-Based Research in the Arts at Canterbury Christ Church University, from 5.30-6.30pm. Please contact the gallery for further details and to book a place.
The exhibition will run until Saturday 21 November and admission is free.
Grierson Award nominated film Public House premieres on 12th October 2015 at the BFI London Film Festival. This genre-blending documentary of spoken word / text/ opera/ film, funded by a production award from Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN) and a research award from the School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent, is directed by Sarah Turner, Reader in Fine Art and Director of Research in the School of Music and Fine Art.
Artist and Ivy House shareholder, Sarah Turner, lives nearby the pub and has been documenting key moments of the community take over since April 2012. Then, the pub’s staff were given a few days notice of eviction and closure; the cherished Ivy
House had been sold for conversion into flats. The creativity and energy of the community ensured this did not happen: the sale was blocked through an English Heritage listing, the pub was registered as the first Asset of Community Value in the UK, then triumphantly purchased. The Ivy House Community Pub re-opened in August 2013 and in doing so has both rewritten London history and proposed the potential for an alternative social imaginary.
We invited Sarah to talk about the inspiration for this ground-breaking work.
“Public House takes participatory documentary to a whole new level. Activated in response to the community take over of the Ivy House pub, London, SE15, the film is a multi layered exploration of memory, community and social reinvention which fuses fact and fiction in a shape shifting genre hybrid that moves documentary into a form of opera. The community owned Ivy House is now itself a shape shifting venue, hosting events as diverse as folk music, swing classes, knitting circles, big band Sunday roasts and samba workshops for pre schoolers. The film mirrors this cultural transformation in a movement through documentary events, to forms of community participation that are rooted in pub culture – in this case, spoken word and performance poetry – to a minimalist opera that is composed of ambient sound and the collective voice. The film’s final image takes the creative energy of the Ivy House out of the pub and onto the streets, where a mass community assembly re-imagines William Blake’s vision of angels on nearby Peckham Rye. “A tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.”
Public House explores the social function of pubs with the Ivy House story at the centre of it. What it means to be local, ideas of insider / outsider, community and participation, home and belonging, are the crucial anxieties of our age, crystallised in our relationship to place and space. Pubs are spaces that allow us to connect with others who are often quite different from us; the encounter with a stranger is at the heart of pub culture, and also – possibly – why we value it. What other spaces allow us to explore our fictions, both the events of our lives, and the complex human emotions which are staples of pub culture – lust, fear, desire and mourning – socially, in a public, as opposed to a private, house?
A unique social choreography took place in the community take over of the Ivy House when a dynamic and defiant community responded to the loss of a treasured public space. The film interweaves portraits of these key characters, events and voices with portraits of the surrounding landscape and streets. Key sequences of animated stills punctuate the work: The Ivy House overlooks a vast field of allotments and wide time-lapsed tableaus have been photographed over a couple of years. This almost pastoral image of artisanal labour, growth and seasonal transformation, offers an alternative portrait of Peckham Rye, an area often associated with the usual urban clichés of blight and decay.
Public House, the film, performs its own unique choreography through its approach to participation: We brought together a group from within the wider pub community to share experience – through writing poetry. We were preoccupied with the idea of remembering an encounter with a stranger that was life changing/ transformative. In the process the poems expanded from that – into – a wider thematic of pub encounters/pub experiences. Empathy, connection and the limits of understanding (what we learn and how we are changed by an other) became a major part of this: participants had to work with /interpret & support the “others” experience and crucially; when they performed the poems in the pub to an invited audience, they were paired off and they performed the other’s poem first. In the film, we intercut both versions of the performance, largely moving from other to self: this produces some uncanny translations – eg, an older woman enacting the story of a much younger man – and is also key to codes of reading; who is inside and outside both the community and the film: There is a synergy in the experience of the pub and film audience: both are re translating, projecting/ re-associating these stories, as we see the person that we suspect is the subject of one story that we’re holding the memory of, narrating or performing another’s.
The multiple levels of voice, memory and performance, are further developed in the word/text poetry of the Soundscape, which carries the underlying structural movement of the film. The Soundscape is composed – as with music concrete – through fragments of spoken word and ambient audio drawn from the immediate environment. Much of this is in the sound design and is developed through accousmatic composition. Accousmatic composers work through an understanding of acoustic ecology, which sonifies ambient sound harmonically and tonally. In the film this builds through sound design/repetitive refrain and culminates in clear shifts where the fragments of voice resolve into fully formed librettos.
These librettos are constructed from verbatim voice recordings of pub users – past and present – engaging in ‘pub talk’: memories of the space as well as their fears, dreams, desires. These recordings form a sonic ethnography of the unconscious of a community: the verbatim performance of memory and imagining – or, the continual and engaged movement of the past in the present – is formed of the collective voice: cyclical refrain builds into harmonics, which stages the creative action and imaginary of the community as a form of creative expression.
The film weaves these elements together: moving from a document of individual memory via the testaments woven through the soundscape, into the pub’s swing dance classes, which re interpret the movement of the 30’s in this 30’s space, through to the staged collective authorship that explores different forms of encounters through performance poetry, the film culminates in a mass assembly which proposes an alternative vision of Blake’s angelic presence. This mass response to a historical image is a metaphor for how our imaginary potential is engaged through an exchange with our past. Public spaces that incorporate our every day, connect us with our past, our fictions and our truths are increasingly being privatised. Public House is an allegory of how the resonance of individual and cultural memory has the potential to reinvent these spaces, and in so doing imagine a different social contract.”
Sarah Turner trained at St Martin’s School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art. She is an artist, filmmaker, writer, curator and academic. Her feature films include Ecology, 97mins, 2007, Perestroika, 118mins, 2009, (theatrically released by the ICA in 2010 and featured in Tate Britain’s major survey: Assembly), and Perestroika:Reconstructed, conceived and executed as a gallery work (Carroll Fletcher Gallery, London, April/ May 2013).
Turner’s short films include Overheated Symphony, UK, 10mins, orchestrated for Birds Eye View Film Festival 2008, Cut, 17 mins, 2000, was broadcast on Channel 4, and A Life in a Day with Helena Goldwater, 20 mins, 1996, and Sheller Shares Her Secret, 8 mins, 1994, both headlined Midnight Underground when they were also broadcast on Channel 4. Sarah has had feature scripts commissioned by the BFI, Film Four Lab and Zephyr Films. Amongst other curatorial projects, Turner produced (with Jon Thomson) the launch programme for Lux Cinema in 1997; Hygiene and Hysteria: The body desired and the body debased, a touring programme of artists’ film and video for Arts Council England and programmes for Tate and the National Film Theatre.
Following the continued success of her book Everyday Music Listening: Absorption, Dissociation and Trancing, (to be reissued in paperback next year), Associate Lecturer in Music Performance at School of Music and Fine, Dr Ruth Herbert, has been invited to give a guest lecture on the topic of ‘ubiquitous listening’ at the University of Leiden, the oldest University in the Netherlands (founded 1575), early in October.
Says, Dr Herbert, “A music psychologist and performer, “The lecture is part of a Music and Society module that asks some pretty big musical questions. What makes music so important in our contemporary society? What is the role, the function, and the position of music in our everyday lives? That’s very much the territory of my book. The digitization of music has allowed people to seamlessly interweave music into all aspects of daily life. Young people especially use music as an extension of self – to experiment with identity and mediate subjective experience in all sorts of ways – from mood control to totally cutting off (dissociating) from self, activity or situation.”
Dr Herbert’s work focuses on the subjective experience of music in daily life, and the transformations of consciousness that may occur in conjunction with listening to and making music. Her extensive research interests also embrace music and wellbeing, music education, evolutionary psychology, ethology and performance psychology. Publications include book chapters and articles in both peer reviewed journals and specialist magazines. She is currently Junior Fellow in the Faculty of Music at Jesus College Oxford and has performed widely as a classical pianist and as a member of a diverse range of ensembles, notably recording soundtracks for two classic silent films.
She has also published extensively on aspects of music teaching and education in mainstream specialist magazines, in addition to undertaking consultancy work for OMD UK (featured in the Mail Online), the Daily Telegraph and the BBC. Ruth is a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Sonic Studies. She is also a member of the Music Education Expo and Musical Theatre and Drama Education Advisory Committee, the NYJC/IoE Jazz and Gender Forum, and (latterly) the Musical Progressions Roundtable.
Everyday Music Listening proves that Music Studies can reach areas and problems inaccessible to other disciplinary modes of investigation. It will be required reading for music scholars, philosophers and clinical psychologists. Professor Tia DeNora, Exeter University
A project aiming to provide practical strategies for students to help them manage stress and anxiety, and which resulted in the team responsible being jointly awarded the 2015 Barbara Morris Prize for Learning Support, resulted in the production of an innovative meditation CD.
The innovative collaborative project team included Louise Frith (School of Music & Fine Art/SLAS), Frank Walker and Moses Malekia (School of Music & Fine Art), Gerard McGill and the Wellbeing Team.
Charlotte Harding, a student from the BA (Hons) Event and Experience Design, was instrumental in the project, coming 2nd in the 2015 Kent Student Awards for Outstanding Contribution to Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity.
Friday 25 September at the ICA, London, sees a book launch to celebrate the publication of Occupy: A People Yet to Come, a collection of essays by leading Deleuzian scholars about the nature and impact of the occupy movement. The book is available from Amazon, is open access from the Open Humanities Press and discounted copies will be available at the launch.
The Book Launch will feature presentations from contributors Nick Thoburn (Deleuze and Marx) and David Burrows (Head of Fine Art: Slade) and Dr Andrew Conio (Senior Lecturer and Director of Fine Art at the School of Music and Fine Art: University of Kent).
For the authors, the term Occupy is a synecdoche for the world-wide proliferation of struggles that fall outside of conventional and ‘vanguard’ politic and are based on new tactics, revitalised democratic processes and nomadic systems of organisation. This collection assesses the value of Deleuze and Guattari’s political ontology to the movement and looks at modes of organisation, economics, social and political forces, democracy, representation, occupation, resistance, aesthetics, leadership and so forth. Essays are written by Claire Colebrook, John Protevi, Ian Buchannan, Eugene Holland, Rodigo Nunes, Giuseppina Mecchia, Andrew Conio, Nicholas Thoburn, David Burrows and Verena Andermatt Conley. The authors hail from USA, UK, Brazil and Australia and most had intimate experience of Occupy
In a review of the book Bert Oliver says ‘It should be abundantly apparent from Conio’s words that the invention of new words or concepts to grapple with the undeniably urgent issues raised by him, above, is a challenge to all the humanities. The incredibly creative work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is indispensable in this regard, as the just published book, Occupy – A People yet to Come amply demonstrates.
Book launch time: 2 – 4pm, followed by drinks 4 – 6pm.
Location: ICA, The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH
As part of the Kantorbury Symposium on 18th and 19th September, with 23 UK and international speakers, performances and film screenings organised by the The European Theatre Research Network (ETRN) on the Canterbury campus, in which the life and work of Polish theatre director and visual artist Tadeusz Kantor is celebrated 100 years after his birth, the School of Music and Fine Art are providing support to enable a new performance work by visual artist (and previous Turner Prize nominee) Goshka Macuga, starting at Chatham Historic Dockyard on the afternoon of Friday 18th September.
Led by Adam Chodzko, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the School of Music and Fine Art, the performance will involve 7 Fine Art and Event & Experience Design (BA and MA) students walking an enormous letter (over 10m long), as a group, dressed as Polish postal workers, from Chatham Historic Dockyard, in order to deliver it to Goshka at the symposium on the University of Kent’s Canterbury Campus.
The tapestry is a several meter long postal envelope made of textile, bearing the address of the Jarman Building, University of Kent. It refers to the famous happening by Tadeusz Kantor carried out in 1967, but also to the potential tensions occurring between art institutions and the society. At the heart of these tensions lies the censorship in Polish art after 1989, the period sometimes referred to as the cold war of artists against the society, and marked by attacks targeted at artworks, artists, curators, directors, and institutions, often committed on anti-Semitic grounds.
To document those difficult times, Macuga decided to embrace within the show also the hate mail addressed to Zachęta and its then director, Anda Rottenberg. The Letter is a testament to those struggles, as well as to the ongoing transformation in the society, which has to confront its fears and prejudices in order to fully accept artistic freedom. This is how the performance looked when staged in Poland : http://artmuseum.pl/en/kolekcja/praca/macuga-goshka-the-letter
About Goshka Macuga
Interdisciplinary artist, born in 1967 in Warsaw, Goshka Macuga is now based in London. In 2008, she was among the four nominees for the prestigious Turner Prize, awarded each year to the most outstanding young British artist. Her practice moves beyond the artist’s traditionally perceived role into a form of ‘cultural archaeology’. Despite incorporating traditional media, such as sculpture, drawing, painting, photography and film, she creates installations in which she also appropriates the work of other artists, archive materials, ready-mades, combining them with objects of her own making. Macuga appropriates the techniques and tactics used by curators of exhibitions or archivists (because of this, her art is often compared to that of Marcel Broodthaers). Macuga has been exhibiting internationally at major museum and galleries since 1999. In 2016 she has a solo exhibition at the New Museum, New York.
The film, Public House, by award winning artist, filmmaker, writer, curator and academic, Sarah Turner, Director of Research and Reader in Fine Art at the School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent, has been shortlisted for the Grierson Award and is being screened at the 2015 BFI London Film Festival.
The hugely prestigious Grierson Award in partnership with the Grierson Trust, recognises documentaries with integrity, originality and social or cultural significance. Public House, a 120 minute film has been described as “A triumphant genre-blending documentary that turns community action to save the local pub from gentrification into an exhilarating participatory opera….this is not just a film about resistance; it is a film that itself refuses categorisation, reinventing documentary reality as a polyphonic clamour of musical subjectivities. (Helen de Witt on the BFI website).
Sarah’s feature films have been broadcast on Channel 4 and she has had scripts commissioned by the BFI, Film Four Lab and Zephyr Films.
Public House is funded by a production award from Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN), a research award from the School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent and is supported by Arts Council England.
Festival screenings take place across London. The film will be shown as follows:
Monday 12 October 2015 20:45, Picturehouse Central, Screen 1
Saturday 17 October 2015 15:20, Rich Mix Cinema, Screen 1
Friday September 4th 2015, 8pm Keynes College, University of Kent, Canterbury
Free entry
Canterbury in the 1960s and 1970s was a hotbed of musical creativity. A community of musicians and bands connected to the city shared an artistic curiosity that encompassed rock, jazz, soul, poetry, folk and contemporary classical music. With a sound that mixed eccentric psychedelia with Miles Davis-style jazz-rock bands such as The Wilde Flowers, Soft Machine, Caravan and Gong had a lasting impact on music in Canterbury and further afield.
This performance features two contemporary bands that share a passion for the Canterbury Sound. Jack Hues and the Quartetare the result of a warped experiment involving an 80’s pop singer (frontman of Wang Chung), a jazz-punk rhythm section (drummer and bassist from Mercurynominated Led Bib) and a classically trained pianist. The younger generation of Canterbury-Sound-influenced bands are represented by The Boot Lagoon, a quartet with incredibly diverse musical paths that converge in joyfully restless jazz-rock riffs.
These bands will each perform a mini set before joining forces to perform the monumental Soft Machine/Hugh Hopper composition ‘Facelift.‘ They will be joined by saxophonist Brian Hopper, who played on the first recording of ‘Facelift’ for the John Peel sessions in 1969.
The original Canterbury Scene emerged in the mid-late 1960s, in parallel with the founding of the University of Kent; indeed the Hopper brothers were raised in Tanglewood, a house which now forms part of the University’s Canterbury campus. Fittingly, the New Canterbury Sound appears as part of the University’s 50th Anniversary Festival, 4-6 September 2015.
The School of Music and Fine Art is delighted to announce that Grenville Hancox, well known for his work as an educationalist, performer and conductor, together with his groundbreaking research with Stephen Clift on the benefits of singing for health, is the new Honorary Professor in Music, Health and Wellbeing.
He was awarded the MBE for services to Music in 2005 and presented with a Civic Award by Canterbury City Council for services to the community through music making in 2006.
Professor Kevin Dawe, Head of the School of Music and Fine Art, commented, “We are really excited about all the possibilities that this creates for the School, and look forward to working with Professor Hancox on both regional and international projects.”
Professor Hancox has directed many orchestral and choral performances in the UK and Europe including some of the most challenging works in the choral repertoire and as a clarinet player has performed extensively throughout the UK, in Europe and the USA appearing amongst others with the Sacconi and Maggini String Quartets and the London Mozart Players.
Until March 2012, he was head of department and director of music at Canterbury Christ Church University having been made the first professor of music in Kent in 2000. Co-founding the Sidney De Haan Research Centre for Arts and Health (2003) and forging a very special relationship between the university and the former master of the Queens Music, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies are two examples of many achievements whilst in post. He has a successful record of fund raising for research projects and for ensuring music is at the heart of any thriving healthy community.
As a Trustee of the Creative Foundation in Folkestone Professor Hancox has championed engagement in the arts as a means of social regeneration and since leaving Canterbury Christ Church University, founded the Canterbury Cantata Trust to emphasising the importance of group singing for all in the community and to encourage younger people to be involved with their communities through practical music activities. In 2010 he established Skylarks, a singing group for people with Parkinson’s, with groups in both Canterbury and London.
As part of the forthcoming 2015 Canterbury Festival, award winning artist and senior lecturer in Fine Art at the School of Music and Fine Art, Adam Chodzko, who was recently shortlisted for the prestigious Jarman Award, will be in conversation with Dr. Andy Birtwistle, Director of The Centre for Practice-Based Research in the Arts at Canterbury Christ Church University on Thursday 15 October, 5.30 – 6.30pm, in the Sidney Cooper Gallery, St Peter’s Street, Canterbury. Book here for In Conversation: http://www.canterburyfestival.co.uk/whats-on/visual-arts/adam-chodzko-in-conversation.aspx
Adam’s exhibition, Design for a Fold, commissioned by Arts Council England and Elephant Trust, will be at the gallery from 20 – 31 October 2015.
Adam Chodzko uses his art to explore the interactions and possibilities of human behaviour. His work investigates and invents the possibilities of collective imagination. Design for a Fold is a new installation created through Chodzko’s continued engagement with Kent and the people who form its communities. Proposing a new understanding of Kent, the viewer is invited to revisit these communities, creating new connections between shared spaces, collective mythology and imagination.
The Canterbury Festival is Kent’s International Arts Festival, attracting an audience of 60,000 people of all ages to over 200 free and ticketed events, drawn from across Kent, London and the South East. Every year festival fortnight includes a wide range of events, including Music, Theatre & Dance, Comedy, Science, Exhibitions, Walks and Talks.
Opening hours: Tue – Fri 10.30am – 5pm, Sat 11.30am – 5pm Address:Sidney Cooper Gallery, St Peter’s Street, Canterbury, CT1 2BQ Website:www.canterbury.ac.uk/sidney-cooper
(Exhibition dates: private view 15 Oct opens 16 Oct – 21 Nov) Contact the gallery for further details on gallery@canterbury.ac.uk or 01227 453267
