SLMpickings - an arts and culture blog
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Arts & entertainment

Art for instagram's sake?

8/9/2016

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A while back I read an article on The Atlantic titled ‘Art for Instagram’s Sake’ by Katherine Schweb, which questioned whether immersive exhibitions were changing the nature of the gallery experience. Undoubtedly visitors are spending more time looking at the art through their phone, ‘meticulously choosing filters to best highlight the vibrant colours and textures of the art before them’, or using the exhibition backdrop for the ‘ultimate selfie’. As she rightly comments, the phenomenon brings art to the masses in a way that hasn’t been achieved before, making people more curious and perhaps more likely to visit galleries themselves. Like her, I disagree that it’s nobody’s place – art critic, art institution, or cultural elite – to say what ways art should or shouldn’t be experienced by an individual, and this is precisely why I found the recent Yoyoi Kusama’s exhibition at London’s Victoria Miro gallery to be a disappointment.

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Art : A force for unification?

7/12/2016

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Since I last posted over a month ago, Britain has made the momentous decision to leave the EU, David Cameron has resigned, the Labour party is in disarray, hate crime has increased, the country will now have its second female conservative PM, and Nigel Farage has - and I quote – ‘got his life back.’ Meanwhile the USA continues to wave around its Trump card and behave like Black Lives don’t Matter.

It’s safe to say the world is going through increasingly uncertain times, but in the midst of the madness art remains. Both in the capital and my hometown of Kingston Upon Hull exciting things have been taking place, providing a welcome break from news otherwise dominated by all the signs of a fractured society.
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21 years of the chelsea art fair

4/22/2016

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The Chelsea Art Fair has been a key date in the International Art Fair calendar for 21 years.

This year, 30 leading UK and International galleries have once again come together in the elegant Chelsea Old Town Hall for four days, from Thursday 21 April until Sunday 24 April. 


SLMpickings headed to the VIP Birthday preview on Wednesday evening to check out the beautiful art on display this year. ​

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Raising the bar on BGT: Another Kind of Blue

4/20/2016

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Last Saturday the nation was wowed by Britain’s Got Talent auditionees Another Kind of Blue. Their immersive performance captivated audiences with its mesmerising story-telling, told through a fusion of animation and contemporary dance. BGT is no stranger to innovative dance groups – 2013 winners Attraction engaged viewers with their shadow theatre performances - but Another Kind of Blue raised the bar further still.
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Choreographer David Middendorp has always been fascinated by the possibilities of dance and animation, so he established the group in 2007 to realise his aspirations. I spoke to him about the troupe’s BGT audition piece and the unique blend of technology and dance.
Another Kind of Blue

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The beautiful interaction:  teamLab

4/19/2016

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Founded in 2001, teamLab is an artistic collaboration with over 400 members, bringing together professionals from various fields of practice in the information age. The interdisciplinary group work to produce completely immersive environments using digital technology.
 
They weren’t immediately well received in the art world, but since 2011 they have exploded onto the international scene, exhibiting in Japan, the USA, France, Australia, Turkey and just last year, the UK.

​I speak to Takashi Kudo about digital technology's important role in promoting positive relations between people.

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The City Garden: Rebecca Louise Law

4/4/2016

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Imagine rows of blooming flowers and central London is unlikely to be the first place that springs to mind, but floral artist Rebecca Louise Law had other ideas for the city last week. Rebecca brought a five-day spectacle from 16-21 March to St Christopher’s Place, suspending 1,200 fresh flowers above the popular shopping and dining spot, located just off Oxford Street. 

Flowers are known to represent life passing, love blossoming, and more aptly in this case, spring starting. An artist renowned for using nature as the medium of her works, Rebecca has been working with flowers for over 15 years, after experimenting with flowers during her BA Hons Fine Art studies at Newcastle University, where she graduated from in 2004. Having grown up in the Cambridgeshire countryside, and spending numerous family holidays in the remote British countryside, experiencing nature was a fundamental part of Rebecca’s childhood. Furthermore, her father’s vocation as Head Gardener of a National Trust property played a role in inspiring her work; nature was almost destined to become her sole inspiration. Rebecca’s work tries to recreate the immersion in nature experienced in the countryside, using it as a buffer from the daily city grind.

The ephemeral quality of flowers provide challenges for Rebecca that 2D oil painting couldn’t, and the transition from vibrant, fresh smelling blooms to skeletal twigs is something Rebecca hopes to capture. She embraces the process of change, and is keen to preserve nature - it is important to her that the flowers used in her works are not wasted. 

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String Quartet in G: Sensing music with Bittersuite

3/15/2016

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​On the final day of Leake Street’s six-week VAULT festival, I took to the tunnel to have my senses livened by some classical music courtesy of a secret BitterSuite performance. Immersive theatre and dining experiences are now fairly common place on the urban social scene, but immersive concerts less so. 

Established by musician and composer Steph Singer, the BitterSuite collective is inspired by synesthesia and psychology and designed to make audiences really feel the music. The concert offered unique one-to-one experiences where each audience member was led through a choreographed sensory experience to Debussy, performed by Phaedra Ensemble instrumentalists. 

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Into the dark with 'All That Fall'

3/10/2016

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Taking lead from Samuel Beckett’s vision, internationally acclaimed director Max Stafford-Clark of Out of Joint theatre company recently took audiences into darkness with a blindfolded live performance of Beckett’s radio play ‘All That Fall’ at Camden School for girls, using 360 degrees sound design and unique audience proximity.

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“When asked by Beckett’s nephew what my vision for the play was, I replied that there would be no vision, that the play would take place in darkness," explained Stafford-Clark as he introduced the show, “He replied that that was exactly how Beckett imagined it – with voices coming from the void.” ​
All That Fall Camden School For Girls

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Playing with the mind: Theatre Ad Infinitum’s ‘Light’

2/16/2016

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When I first visited Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) a couple of years ago it was to see Daniel Kitson in the Grand Hall, which looks somewhat different now than it did back then after flames engulfed it last March. 

BAC was adamant that the building would get back to its former glory ‘brick by brick’, and this resilience will see the new Hall opened in 2018. Until then a more temporary space is in use; after all the show must go on! 

Theatre Ad Infinitum’s ‘Light’ went down a storm at The Barbican last year, so I was keen to bag tickets when I heard it was returning to London at BAC.

​It is fitting that such an immersive, ground-breaking show was to grace the stage at a venue where the mission has always been to ‘invent the future of theatre’.

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The bizarre cocktail ‘Champagne Life’... and the more poignant REVELATIONS

2/7/2016

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The Saatchi Gallery is toasting it’s 30th Birthday with ‘Champagne Life’, its first all-female exhibition. It was the gender-specific promise which inspired me to visit; Saatchi and his crew successfully made enough of a point about it to fool me into thinking it would in some way inform what was on show. Critics have thus far collectively noted that the show had no real theme or curatorial arrangement, and that the all-female element was nothing more than ‘tokenism’...and on the whole I’d have to agree. Very little information was to hand to suggest reasoning behind the chosen artists or work, leaving nothing but the knowledge of shared gender to guide you through the show.

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I searched for meaning on these grounds, and found it to be lurking in the domesticity implied by Maha Malluh’s ‘Food For Thought’ pans, the mundane yet essential objects signifying the nurturing mother figure; the tenderness in Seung Ah Palik’s ‘Maitreya', bare flesh touching bare flesh; and Alice Anderson’s giant bobbin ‘Bound’, just waiting for a giant woman to pick it up and begin making and mending. This is, however, where it stopped.

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Such meanings were ascribed by myself as a way to make sense of the combination of works bundled together. Shellie Sojhanvari’s taxidermy horse ‘Moje Sabz’ and Mia Feuer’s ‘Jerusalem Donkey’ seemed at odds with the theme I was trying to build, serving instead as a sign to stop looking for something that really wasn’t there.
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