The Ulm Model @ Raven Row, London

The Ulm Model
Raven Row, London
5 October - 18 December 2016  

Precision balance

Student: Gerda Müller-Krauspe

Instructors: Hans Gugelot, Walter Zeischegg and Georg Leowald

1959-60, Industrial Design

Photo by Wolfgang Siol

Courtesy HfG-Archiv / Ulmer Museum

During its short life from 1953 to 1968, The Ulm School of Design (HfG Ulm) in Southern Germany pioneered an interdisciplinary and systematic approach to design education – known as the Ulm Model – that was to become universal. This is the first exhibition in the UK to represent the achievements of the School, including the foundation work in drawings and models by the students and the radical designs famously commissioned from the School by corporate clients such as Braun and Lufthansa.

From radiographs and weighing machines to traffic lights, petrol cans, bed frames and kitchenware, the exhibition will gather and correlate objects designed for diverse industries at HfG Ulm. Braun GmbH is providing the exhibition with the last remaining units of their iconic D55 display structure, designed at the School in 1955 to exhibit its modernist reinvention of Braun’s audio sets.

On the face of it, the HfG Ulm had little to do with art. Design work was mostly collectivised and rationalised, the idea of the designer as intuitive ‘artist' emphatically rejected, and the designer's role understood as only one amongst the many specialisms of industrial production. But this exhibition suggests that the School continued the projects of the artistic avant-gardes, especially Constructivism, in that objects were systematically designed to project ideal social relations.

The exhibition is curated by Peter Kapos. Its display furniture is designed by David Kohn Architects.

Raven Row
56 Artillery Lane - London E1 7LS
www.ravenrow.org

The Inoperative Community @ Raven Row, London

The Inoperative Community
Raven Row, London
3 December 2015 - 14 January 2016

Serge Bard, Eric Baudelaire, Ericka Beckman, Cinema Action, Patrick Deval, Lav Diaz, Mati Diop, Stephen Dwoskin, Luke Fowler, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Johan Grimonprez, Marc Karlin, Stuart Marshall, Anne-Marie Miéville, Pere Portabella, Yvonne Rainer, Jackie Raynal, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Helke Sander, Jon Sanders, James Scott, Albert Serra, Leslie Thornton, Humphry Trevelyan

Leslie Thornton 

Peggy and Fred in Hell: Folding (1985-2015)  

Still from digital video (originated on 16mm film), 95 mins

Courtesy of the artist

'The Inoperative Community' is an exhibition of experimental narrative film and video that broadly address crises of sociality and community. It draws on works made since 1968 for cinema, television and the gallery, with subjects that range from the construction of memory to game theory, and artificial intelligence. The exhibition's title is borrowed from Jean-Luc Nancy's 1986 essay of the same name, and while this connection did not determine the selection of works, they all bear witness in their own way to Nancy's characterisation of the 'dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community'. Many concern the limits of political activism and failures of the revolutionary politics of the late 1960s. 

Research for the exhibition began by finding means to reconstruct Journal of the Plague Year (1984), the defiant installation about the Aids crisis by Stuart Marshall (1949–93, UK). Other significant presentations include a new edit – within an installation designed for the exhibition – of the thirty-year project Peggy and Fred in Hell (1984–2015) by Leslie Thornton (b. 1951, USA), featuring footage shot on a residency at Raven Row; while newly available reels from the epic Five Year Diary (1981–97) by Anne Charlotte Robertson (1949–2012, USA), preserved by the Harvard Film Archive, will be screened for the first time in the UK. 

The exhibition – itself constituting a kind of inoperative community – attempts to reframe discussions about the overlapping and entangled histories of art, cinema and television. Visitors will be invited to select from over fifty hours of material. Comfortable seating has been designed to enable prolonged viewing as well as shorter visits, while, in the manner of a film festival, all starting times will be indicated. Alongside the galleries, a purpose-built screening room will show five daily programmes, each a point of departure for thinking about experimental film. 

The exhibition is curated by London-based writer and curator Dan Kidner.

Raven Row
56 Artillery Lane
London E1 7LS
www.ravenrow.org

Bela Kolarova Retrospective, Raven Row, London, 2013

Běla Kolářová
Raven Row, London
31 January - 7 April 2013

Raven Row, London, presents the first posthumous retrospective of the work of Czech artist Běla Kolářová (1923-2010). The show is both the first solo exhibition of the artist in the UK and the first major survey of her work outside the Czech Republic.

BELA KOLAROVA 

Alphabet of Things, 1964

Silver bromide photograph

13.8 x 18.8 cm

Courtesy of the Estate of Běla Kolářová

From her trademark ‘artificial negatives’, ‘pure light drawings’ and ‘derealised portraits’ to her assemblages and collages, Běla Kolářová pioneered an art based on intimate objects often associated with domesticity and the feminine. The works on display will span Kolářová’s career to include documentary photographs from the late fifties, camera-less experiments, ‘arranged’ photographs of objects and hair and assemblages from the sixties, as well as make-up drawings and assemblages from the seventies and eighties.

While rooted in the context of the Cold War and exile, Běla Kolářová’s practice is also closely linked to the life of her husband, the influential artist and poet Jiří Kolář, whose work overshadowed her own until its recent rediscovery. Despite the difficulties of exhibiting in her own country, she was able to develop a unique body of work, both formally and conceptually. As this exhibition will demonstrate, its legacy to the history of art – on both sides of the Iron Curtain – is anything but modest, unlike its materials and its author’s personality.

An accompanying catalogue published by Raven Row will include new essays by Prague-based writer and curator Karel Císař and Matthew S Witkovsky, Chair and Curator of the Department of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as an edited conversation between Alice Motard and Czech art historian Marie Klimešová, who organised the most complete exhibition of the artist’s work to date at Olomouc Museum of Art in the Czech Republic in 2006.

The exhibition is curated by Marie Klimešová and Alice Motard.

BELA KOLAROVA (born 1923, Terezín, former Czechoslovakia, died 2010, Prague). In 1980, during the era of ‘Normalisation’, Běla Kolářová and her husband Jiří Kolář left Czechoslovakia and lived in Paris before moving back to Prague in 1999. Kolářová’s work can be found in a number of private and public collections, among which the National Gallery and the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the Olomouc Museum of Art, and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. Since it was shown at documenta 12 in Kassel in 2007, her work has been included in group exhibitions in Vienna, Paris, London, Schwaz (Austria) and Cologne.

RAVEN ROW
56 Artillery Lane
London E1 7LS
Gallery's website: www.ravenrow.org

APG - Artist Placement Group 1966-1979, Raven Row, London

The Individual and the Organisation: Artist Placement Group 1966-1979
Raven Row, London
Through 16 December 2012

This is the first retrospective of the pioneering artists' organisation Artist Placement Group, or APG, conceived by Barbara Steveni in 1965 and established a year later by Steveni and John Latham along with Barry Flanagan, David Hall, Anna Ridley and Jeffrey Shaw, among others.

Between 1966 and the turn of the 1980s, APG negotiated approximately fifteen placements for artists lasting from a few weeks to several years; first within industries (often large corporations such as British Steel and ICI) and later within UK government departments such as the Department of Health and the Scottish Office. APG arranged that artists would work to an ‘open brief’, whereby their placements were not required to produce tangible results, but that the engagement itself could potentially benefit both host organisations as well as the artists in the long-term. Artists' work in proposing and carrying out placements is represented here in diverse ways, in films, photographs, texts and correspondence and sometimes in art objects.

APG was a milestone in Conceptual Art in Britain, reinventing the means of making and disseminating art, and anticipating many of the issues facing cultural workers today. It represented itself in a number of exhibitions and events, notably in the exhibition Art and Economics at the Hayward Gallery in 1971 with artistic interventions by Garth Evans, Barry Flanagan, John Latham and others. Emulating APG's emphasis on the discursive, the exhibition will host frequent public discussions relating to art and social organisation.

The exhibition is curated by Antony Hudek and Alex Sainsbury, in consultation with Barbara Steveni.


RAVEN ROW EXHIBITION PROGRAMME 2013
Běla Kolářová, 31 January - 7 April 2013
Padraig Timoney, 25 April - 16 June 2013
Iain Baxter& and Adam Chodzko, July 2013
Psychedelia Curated by Lars Bang Larsen, 26 September - 15 December 2013

Raven Row
56 Artillery Lane
London E1 7LS
Gallery's website: www.ravenrow.org

Live art sound performances at Raven Row, London, June-July 2011

Gone with the Wind 

Live Art Sound Performances 

Raven Row, London 

June & July 2011 

Photo of ESTHER FERRER - Unesco Paris - CourtesyRaven Row, London 

In conjunction with the sound art exhibition Gone with the Wind, Raven Row presents a programme of seven sound based performances through June and July 2011. Including established artists such as Esther Ferrer, the programme will also comprise presentations from the burgeoning experimental music and sound art scene selected by Ed Baxter, exhibition curator and director of art radio station Resonance104.4fm. 

Esther Ferrer 

Saturday 25 June, 7pm

Artist Esther Ferrer (b. 1937, Spain), is best known for her radical performances, her principal form of artistic expression since 1965, both as a soloist and as a member of pioneering experimental music and performance art group ZAJ (1959-93). Alongside composers Juan Hidalgo and Walter Marchetti, Ferrer participated in the group's ‘visible music’ actions and extended concerts. Known as a proponent of free expression, confrontation, feminism and authentic experience, Ferrer will present an entirely new performance piece in Raven Row’s gallery space.

Saturday 2 July, 2pm

The Bonham Brothers are two London based brothers and noise musicians known for making music by playing bric-a-brac as instruments. A burnt tape machine found during the recent restoration of Raven Row has been made into a sculpture by artist Richard Crow for the Resonance Open. Crow and the Bonham Brothers will resurrect the destroyed machine as an instrument for this performance. 

Thursday 7 July, 7pm

The Resonance Radio Orchestra will perform the newly composed Lascia o raddoppia? [Double or quits?], a radiophonic reconstruction of the 1950s Italian television quiz show of the same name. One of the winners of this hugely popular show was Walter Marchetti, an artist in the current exhibition Gone with the Wind, who as a teenager answered questions on contemporary music. Another contestant was quintessential avant-garde composer John Cage, answering questions about his specialist subject of mushrooms.

Saturday 9 July, 2pm

Alongside a sixteen strong choir, Israeli singer and experimental musician Sharon Gal will perform The Long Drone. Acoustic instruments and multiple voices will ‘drone’ for two hours in a style pitched somewhere between natural soundscapes, La Monte Young's The Theatre of Eternal Music and The Scratch Orchestra.

Sunday 10 July, 2pm

Sound artists and theorists Lucia Farinati and Brandon LaBelle will discuss the newly published Site of Sound, a book that considers radio as a sonic architecture. Sound researcher Ian Rawes will join them to introduce a discussion about field recording and phonography.

Saturday 16 July, 2pm

British artist Christopher Weaver will perform Variations for a Room and a Tone, an installation that will make audible the resonant frequencies of Raven Row to produce music. Weaver will be joined by the members of the electro-acoustic quartet Oscillatorial Binnage.

Sunday 17 July, 2pm

Radio artists Sarah Washington and Knut Aufermann form the Anglo-German duo Tonic Train who will give a performance combining radio feedback and wine. Having recently moved to the Mosel region of Germany, in the heart of the country's wine growing area, Tonic Train will combine their new found passion for vinification with a lifelong saturation in avant-garde sonic arts.

All events are free and places will be allocated on a first come first served basis. Reservation needed for Esther Ferrer event.

RAVEN ROW, LONDON, UK

www.ravenrow.org

Max Eastley, Takehisa Kosugi, Walter Marchetti, Resonance104.4fm - Pioneers of sound art exhibition at Raven Row, London

Exhibition: Gone with the Wind 
Max Eastley, Takehisa Kosugi, Walter Marchetti, Resonance104.4fm  
Raven Row, London 
Through 17 July 2011 

RAVEN ROW LONDON

This exhibition brings together three pioneers of sound art, Max Eastley, Takehisa Kosugi and Walter Marchetti. Each artist has developed a distinct approach to the problem of representing immateriality, while sharing a lightness of touch, approaching sound with patience, restraint and fidelity. As well as presenting new and historic work, the exhibition comprise live performance, and a selection of material from the artists' substantial archives.

MAX EASTLEY (born 1944, UK) is an artist and musician whose sound sculptures play on a balance between the natural environment and human intervention. His musical collaborations include the 1975 album New And Rediscovered Musical Instruments with David Toop, produced by Brian Eno. His response to the interior of Raven Row is a meditation on the 18th century Picturesque, achieved with 21st century technology and a ‘Bergsonian’ approach to time. 

TAKEHISA KOSUGI (born 1938, Japan) is a major figure in modernist sound art. In the early 1960s his event pieces were realised by Fluxus in Europe and the USA. Kosugi pioneered the development of Japanese experimental music with Group ONGAKU and the Taj Mahal Travellers. Since 1977 he has been a composer/performer at Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and became its Music Director in 1995. As well as archival material, Takehisa Kosugi will present a number of works including the sound installation Mano-Dharma, electronic, 1967/2011.

WALTER MARCHETTI (born 1931, Italy) was a founder member of ZAJ, a recalcitrant Mediterranean parallel to Fluxus, which in the 1960s produced action-music-performances, anarchic gags, and elegant assaults on the music establishment. Marchetti befriended John Cage in 1958, and went on to collaborate with him on a number of projects. His work has often focused on the grand piano – for more than 50 years he has been preparing them like a chef intent on marinating sound. Two of Walter Marchetti's pianos, alongside works from Emanuele Carcano's Collection, are exhibited. 

WALTER MARCHETTI

Walter Marchetti, Musica da camera n. 182

Milano, Pianofortissimo, 

Fondazione Mudima, January 1990. 

Photograph by Fabrizio Garghetti 

Courtesy of Raven Row, London

Alongside these positions, RESONANCE104.4FM is installed at Raven Row for the duration of the exhibition, broadcasting, and hosting workshops and live events, as well as presenting an 'overhung' sound installation – the Resonance Open – with contributions solicited from local and international sound artists. Resonance104.4fm is the world’s first radio art station, established by London Musicians’ Collective, it started broadcasting on May 1st 2002. Its brief is to provide a radical alternative to the universal formulae of mainstream broadcasting.

The exhibition is curated by ED BAXTER, director of Resonance104.4fm.

RAVEN ROW, LONDON, UK
56 Artillery Lane
London E1 7LS

www.ravenrow.org

Resonance104.4fm website: www.resonancefm.com