It’s a busy weekend in art. Fierce Festival opens in Birmingham, boasting live art, dance and theatre, along with the Brighton Photo Biennial in the South. But, staying close to home and following on from the success of last year, London is once again graced by the Art Licks Weekend. It’s namesake magazine, created by founder Holly Willats, has been running since 2010 and is now in Issue 15. Like the printed matter, the weekend focuses on emerging artists and project spaces, partnering them as well as accessing other more unusual locations, unfolding a vast array of events over the city. Here, we chart our pick of its most unmissable moments.
Having created a download, a ‘virtual tour’ and a playable game IRL at the White Building in Hackney Wick, Lawrence Lek has covered his bases. His ‘utopian virtual world’, as with all good sci-fi, resembles a London reality. The game enables players to explore a skewed environment and navigate a transport network modelled on the iconic Circle line that connects art galleries and project spaces across the city.
Open School East opens its doors on Sunday for a moving image programme in association with LUX. An excellent chance to watch a carefully curated screening of “Artist Moving Image” including works by Johann Arens, Lucy Clout and Fabienne Hess.
The Art Licks Weekend performance programme, curated by Eva Rowson, locates itself in East and South-East London and considers the links between art and audience, host and guest. Including some site-responsive works like Lucy Joyce’s Peckham rooftop interventions, the Friday line-up also features Daniel Kelly with his DKUK hair salon – a play on an artist’s salon and a hairdressers (appointments at dkuksalon@hotmail.com on a pay-what-you-can basis) – alongside Andy Holden and Leslie Kulesh. The Saturday programme includes a special live broadcast element being ‘hosted’ on Radio Anti.
The Space Above Your Head, 2014Courtesy of Lucy Joyce
Jacobs’ solo show at Project Number gallery in Stoke Newington launches with a number of artist print commissions, a self-help tinged text and a website that fades to black and back again, breathing ominously...
“How are you getting along with your current juggling act? Do you think you can manage to spin one more plate? The trouble is, the more you have to keep an eye on, the less time you have to sit and wonder whether you really need to be keeping an eye on quite so much. It is hard to try to stop and draw breath, when you feel as if you must keep running for your life. Yet what are you really running from - and towards? If you do stop for a moment this week, the only thing to catch up with you will be a sense of perspective”.
INHALE, the deep-breathing website is nothing short of immersiveCandice Jacobs
A sculpture exhibition with a temporal twist, the presented objects are bound to their context within the private interior. As the viewer investigates the New Cross apartment, relationships between the specially commissioned works and the site for which they were made are revealed. Artists include Katrin Hanusch and Toby Ziegler.
Fresh from her solo show opening at Liverpool’s Royal Standard, the artist will deliver a live VJ set alongside music by Ian Thorn in the unusual location of a domestic flat in Clapton.
aLIVE will take place in a domestic Clapton flatConduire
An exciting (if you’re an atmos-geek) opportunity to get down the Brunel Shaft (by the Brunel Museum) on Railway Avenue in Rotherhithe and see some performances such as Artur Vidal’s live work using the fragments of a previously deconstructed piano and Kristina Pulejkova’s ‘experimental visual set’ with musician Glen Johnson.
Hello Ape Eyes will provide a multimedia, sensory mash-upCharlotte Wendy Law
A variety of events surrounding Dig Collective and their exertions back in in June, when the four artists responded to the redevelopment plan for an old rectory in Hackney Central by digging a large hole. This series of events will see the hole documented, purified, turned into a pinhole camera and then filled, but not before Iain Sinclair himself turns up and has a chat, then screens his film “Swandown”, made with Andrew Kotting back in 2011 when they embarked on a Swan-Pedallo-buoyed British Odyssey.
The Dig Collective will turn a large, dirt-ridden hole into a pinhole camera
Who better qualified than alternative educational collective School of the Damned to unite with fellow artists and speakers for a day of talks and presentations centring around art school and the (currently very pricey and gradually eroding) university system. They will consider and propose what the alternative(s) might be, alongside an appearance from artist-slash-musician duo Pil & Galia Kollectiv.
School of the Damned will give a series of talks on an alternative university system at the Five Years gallery
Jupiter Woods is an apt name for the house-turned-residency space and gallery that inspired artists Eloïse Bonneviot and Anne de Boer to create a permanent addition to the property’s garden. Interested in the medicinal properties of mushrooms, as well as their mythological significance, the pair plan to nurture nine different species of mushroom in various organic structures and patterns, in doing so respond to their discovery of toxic waste near the site of the garden. For this weekend, they open up the space for a Mushroom brunch, dinner, video screening and ‘Shroom Music & Myco_educational_VJ-set’.
Jupiter Woods will be providing shrooms al-frescoEloïse Bonneviot and Anne de Boer
For finalised information on venues and times, check the online programme.
