29 April – 21 June 2015
Preview: Tuesday 28 April, 6.30–8.30pm
Opening hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12–6pm and Sunday 21 June, 12–6pm
The Showroom presents a major new commission by Wendelien van Oldenborgh and her first solo exhibition in London.
From Left to Night is an experimental film production through which a number of seemingly unconnected players, places, events, subjects and histories, drawn from The Showroom's neighbourhood, meet. It involves five people, three locations, and the different subjects and forms of knowledge that they bring with them. These range from urban tensions – such as unresolved histories of the 2011 London riots – to music and the personal ways in which each of the protagonists relate to ideas of the political. Material gathered in a concentrated two-day shoot has been brought together in a film installation specially conceived for The Showroom.
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The project developed out of the artist’s year-long engagement with The Showroom’s local area. In particular, a music video project initiated by van Oldenborgh and local hip hop artist Reveal, performed by Owls, became an important step towards cementing relationships with some of the players in this film. Through carefully orchestrated scenarios van Oldenborgh creates situations where these elements collide and trigger new articulations and sparks of logic; generating the ‘script’ with the full involvement of the players, as filming unfolds.As with the artist’s previous works, the film explores social dynamics and behaviours, the governing systems and architectures which provoke and reinforce these, and the voice and language of the individual amidst them. In so doing van Oldenborgh reveals a reality often hidden from view in the public realm, in an attempt to understand familiar stories in a new way.
This new commission forms part of How to work together, a shared programme of contemporary art commissioning and research devised by The Showroom, Studio Voltaire and Chisenhale Gallery.
How to work together is supported by a capacity building and match funding grant from Arts Council England through Catalyst Arts, with additional funding in the second year from Bloomberg, Jerwood Charitable Foundation and the How to work together Artist Commissions Production Fund. This commission is also supported by the Mondriaan Fund and The Embassy of The Netherlands. Special thanks to: Camden Arts Centre, Lisson Gallery, Lennaart van Oldenborgh and Smadar Dreyfus, Eliot Cohen, Robert Gordon McHarg III, Sam Belinfante, Richard Whitby and all of the cast and crew.
Cast:
Denise Ferreira Da Silva writes about and researches violence and ethical issues of the global present, using tools from critical legal theory as well as feminist, racial and postcolonial theorising.
Dean Burke is known in the music scene as Owls and lives locally to The Showroom.
Mehrak Golestan researches hip hop pedagogy in his Masters studies at SOAS and is known as the hip hop artist Reveal. He lives locally to The Showroom.
Wanderley Moreira Dos Santos trains as a psychodynamic psychotherapist at Tavistock Centre and researches race relations in Brazil through cultural forms such as breakdance and hip hop.
Louise Shelley works with various collectives, generating communal knowledge through art practice. She works at The Showroom as the Collaborative Projects Curator.
Romeo K. Gambier is a hip hop DJ, known in the Dutch scene as Mixmaster Fader, he has appeared in various of van Oldenborgh's works since 2005.
Locations:
Paddington Green Police Station is where UK terror suspects are detained and questioned.
Joe Strummer Subway runs between Edgware Road underground station and Paddington Green Police Station. Subway Gallery, conceived by artist Robert Gordon McHarg III, is situated in a 1960s kiosk.
Red Bus Recording Studio is a local recording studio whose fame dates back to the early 1980s when Duran Duran recorded ‘Girls on Film’ there.
Based in Rotterdam, van Oldenborgh has recently been awarded the prestigious Dr AH Heineken Prize for Art and is currently spending a year in Berlin on a DAAD residency.
MoreA collaborative project, commissioned within the frameworks of Communal Knowledge and How to work together.
The first phase took place in 2014 in which two local hip hop artists produced a music video connected to the London riots. The discourse and process surrounding this fed into to a major new film commission by Van Oldenborgh.
More
Wendelien van Oldenborgh, From Left to Night, 2015, installation view. Photo: Daniel Brooke. © Wendelien van Oldenborgh. Courtesy the artist.
Wendelien van Oldenborgh, From Left to Night, 2015, installation view. Photo: Daniel Brooke. © Wendelien van Oldenborgh. Courtesy the artist.
Wendelien van Oldenborgh, From Left to Night, 2015, installation view. Photo: Daniel Brooke. © Wendelien van Oldenborgh. Courtesy the artist.
Wendelien van Oldenborgh, From Left to Night, 2015, installation view. Photo: Daniel Brooke. © Wendelien van Oldenborgh. Courtesy the artist.
Wendelien van Oldenborgh, From Left to Night, 2015, installation view. Photo: Daniel Brooke. © Wendelien van Oldenborgh. Courtesy the artist.
Wendelien van Oldenborgh, From Left to Night, 2015, installation view. Photo: Daniel Brooke. © Wendelien van Oldenborgh. Courtesy the artist.
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