Antoine Bertin, Photography: Zoë Josephine Payne

Symposium in which speakers Anne Hilde Neset, Deputy Editor of The Wire, and the writer, composer, sound artist and broadcaster Robert Worby have been invited to address issues of sonic practice raised by the exhibition Noise Control.

The symposium, to take place at Donlon Books next door to IMT, will also give visitors the chance to speak directly to the artists about their work.

Places are free but reservation will be necessary. To reserve a place call 020 8980 5475 or email IMT.

Antoine Bertin, Photography: Zoë Josephine Payne

Private View: Monday 30 November 6:00 - 9:00 PM
Performance Evening: Thursday 3 December 6:00 - 9:00 PM
Symposium: Saturday 5 December 3:00 - 6:00 PM

An exhibition of new works by eight sound artists, Noise Control addresses the manner in which we deal with the subtle balance between different concepts of noise and how it undergoes transformation in the arts.

There exist vastly differing interpretations of what constitutes ‘noise’, and the exhibition demonstrates how the artistic control of noise lies at the very heart of artistic practices, whether they be music, installation, film, or performance. Noise Control presents work by Antoine Bertin, Haris Custovic, Karl Gibson, Victoria Karlsson, Matthias Kassmannhuber, Zuzana Novak, Alex Paschali and Marco Schilling.

Some of the artists in the exhibition use noise as the medium to reveal sonic properties: Custovic’s video work examining the facial expressions in reaction to unfamiliar sounds, or Schilling’s shaping of background noise to explore the boundaries where noise and music overlap. Karlsson addresses the transformation of sounds to and from language, and how the inconsistent nature of verbal communication incorporates shifts of meaning and interpretation that oscillate between signification and noise.

Other works show how noise can be shaped by our environment. Kassmannhuber’s site-specific installation demonstrates how audio feedback can be controlled through the manipulation of its trajectory through space, whilst Paschali explores the near-mythologising of the notion of resonant frequencies and Bertin’s sonic “explorations” document sounds from spaces just outside of our reach.

Other artists deal with more socio-cultural definitions of noise. Novak explores the voices of London’s homeless population, her work revealing how these voices, overlooked or ignored by mainstream society, occupy and shape our concepts of social space. Gibson is concerned with the origins of the customs and traditions of Hip-Hop and whether they have been misappropriated as Hip-Hop culture is absorbed into the mainstream.

Noise Control is curated by Joel Cahen and Mark Jackson, IMT’s project co-ordinator. Cahen practices in sound, video and improvisation. He creates sound for films and dance productions and plays on a weekly radio show on Resonance FM called Soundsoup. Together with sound artist Wajid Yaseen of Uniform, Cahen created Scrap Club, a public destructivist activity. In 2008 Cahen created the touring underwater sound art gallery Wet Sounds.

Noise Control is an exhibition and symposium presenting the final work of eight MA Sound Arts graduates of London College of Communication. The groundbreaking work in the exhibition demonstrated the high level of critical debate in sonic disciplines fostered by the university’s Department of Sound Art and Design since 1998.

Still from ‘Stiletto’ by Adam Roberts

The third in the ‘Filmarmalade Presents Lil Joe’s, 9/11, Porn, Yanks and Murder…’ series of artist film and video screenings at IMT.

Adam Roberts’ ‘Stiletto’, enacts a few moments in the life of a young orphaned boy who restlessly wiles away the time in the suburban idyll of his aunt’s unloving home. Haunted by self-doubt and loathing for all that surrounds him, he creates through a series of ritualistic offerings, an animal deity, which he keeps caged in a shed at the bottom of the garden and whose existence ultimately leads to a horrific finale.

The screening also includes an interview, specially commissioned with Adam Roberts at Gordon Shrigley’s studio with Miranda Pennell and Jonathan Romney.

Still from ‘An Interview with Adam Roberts’ by Gordon Shrigley

Adam Roberts’ recently screened work at Performatica, Mexico, the Zodiak Festival, Helsinki, the Point, Eastleigh, The Filmhuis, Den Haag and at Todds Gallery, Hastings. He was born in Colombia and lives and works in London.

Filmarmalade is an artist run project established to publish on DVD selected artists’ films and video works, so as to encourage a wider access to the moving image and to allow a greater understanding, through specially commissioned interviews of how each artist situates their work, in relation to the history of art and contemporary fine art practice.

A limited edition DVD of Adam Roberts ‘Stiletto’, published by Filmarmalade will be available to buy on the night for £12.99

filmarmalade.co.uk

Marmalade and Filmarmalade are not simply an artists’ book and artists film and video publishing platform, but projects that, like IMT’s, aim to inspire debate around issues integral to contemporary arts practice.

Gordon Shrigley on Marmalade & Filmarmalade:

“Sometime after finishing the work Insignificance around 2000, I’d been working on a series of drawings that explored the idea that somehow line underpins consciousness and wanted to start to think further about why lineature, although it occupies a central role within artistic practice and human culture more generally, nevertheless remains largely unacknowledged.

“And so i started Marmalade as a vehicle to try and understand how line forms the basis for a wide variety of disciplines, but also as a space, a loose clearing if you like, for an intimate conversation between artists to talk about what they have come to see and understand about their chosen medium.

“So when I decided to broaden the scope of the project by publishing artists’ film and video as well as bookworks, the theme of an artists’ relation to medium was extended into the form of filmed interviews, to accompany the film works. And again, to progress the idea of an intimate conversation, I constructed the interviews to be as open as possible, simply the length of an HDV tape with little editing, as a way of recording the space created by the artist, their language, terms of reference, gestures and sense of commitment to practice.

“I would say then, that the Marmalade and Filmarmalade projects are both a way of distributing art through bookworks and DVD’s to a wider audience, but also as a tactic to create a series of wandering conversations around the question of whether there is a form of knowledge available to artists’ alone, that emerges through the discipline of working with a particular medium over time. And if we can agree that this is at the very least an intriguing possibility, how might we come to speak about this arcane form of knowledge, which appears to exist outside of the accepted vicissitudes of what we understand as art history?”

Gordon Shrigley - September 2009

The next event at IMT will be a screening of ‘Stiletto’ by Adam Roberts on 12 November at 18:00 as part of Filmarmalade Presents Lil Joe’s, 911, Porn, Yanks and Murder…

Filmarmalade Presents Lil Joe’s, 9/11, Porn, Yanks and Murder…

‘Stiletto’ by Adam Roberts
‘Preemptive Disappearance’ by Francisca Benitez
‘Invitation to a Peaceful City’ - Kelvin Kyung Kun Park

Filmarmalade

To accompany the exhibition Songbook, IMT hosted an artists’ talk with Polish artist and composer Wojciech Kosma on Saturday 19 September from 18:00 - 21:00. Through the talk Roger Redgate, composer and Head of Compoosition at Goldsmiths College, and Mark Jackson, Project Co-ordinator at IMT, discussed with Kosma the motivations behind Songbook, and issues raised by the work in the exhibition.

Songbook is an exhibition of cutting edge sound art by Polish artist and composer Wojciech Kosma, in which art, artist and audience intersect.

Wojciech Kosma lives between Berlin and London, working between art and composition. His compositions have been performed widely, most recently at Light Industry, New York, at Goldsmiths University in London, in the Chilean Embassy in Paris and in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. His works were also recently exhibited in Lyst in Overgaden in Copenhagen, The Real Thing in MU Eindhoven, Club Transmediale, CCA Zamek Ujazdowski in Warsaw and at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 2007 he established the Wrong Ensemble who performed at IMT in 2008.

Wojciech Kosma – Songbook was curated by Pawel Kaminski of IMT, and supported by the Arts Council England and the Polish Cultural Institute.

An exhibition of cutting edge musical compositions by Polish artist Wojciech Kosma, in which art, artist and audience intersect. In autumn 2009 IMT hosted an interactive exhibition of Kosma’s scores, directions for musical pieces and art works, the majority of which had never been published or performed before.

Many of Kosma’s compositions use radical or bizarre methods of working with music and its relationship to the human body and ask alternately for specific forms of human interaction or endurance. His poetic and conceptual scores and performances combine elements of psychology and physiology, but also pornography, logic and irony, with traditional musical notation.

In Songbook the idea of the audience as performer sits at the heart of Kosma’s thoughts about art and music in his belief that to really hear a piece of music one must attempt to play it. Visitors to the exhibition were given opportunities to perform Kosma’s scores, alongside video performances of some of his works by Jeki Zaborov. Performances from Songbook, and other works, are online here and are updated as his project continues.

Wojciech Kosma lives between Berlin and London, working between art and composition. His compositions have been performed widely, most recently at Light Industry, New York, at Goldsmiths University in London, in the Chilean Embassy in Paris and in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. His works were also recently exhibited in Lyst in Overgaden in Copenhagen, The Real Thing in MU Eindhoven, Club Transmediale, CCA Zamek Ujazdowski in Warsaw and at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 2007 he established the Wrong Ensemble who performed at IMT in 2008.

Wojciech Kosma – Songbook was curated by Pawel Kaminski of IMT, and supported by the Arts Council England and the Polish Cultural Institute.

Still from ‘Invitation to a Peaceful City’ by Kelvin Kyung Kun Park

The second in a series of artist’s film and video screenings at IMT in collaboration with Filmarmalade.

Kelvin Kyung Kun Park’s ‘Invitation to a Peaceful City’ poetically mediates on the various forms of cultural resistance and simple quotidian ways of making do, that a variety of displaced Korean villagers have made after being first displaced by the Japanese and then the US Air Force.

Amongst the barrage of sounds that assaults the area and with interviews with the local population, Park’s work speaks about the conflict that has arisen between those now tied into the economy of the base and others who still live under its shadow.

The screening includes an interview, specially commissioned for the DVD, with Kelvin Kyung Kun Park at his studio in Seoul with Jeff Rogers and Patrick Smith.

Still from ‘An Interview with Kelvin Kyung Kun Park’ by Gordon Shrigley

Kelvin Kyung Kun Park recently screened work at Recontres Internationales, Paris, the Seoul Independent Film Festival, Seoul, the LA Freewaves, Media Arts Festival, Los Angeles and at the B&W Gallery, California Institute of the Arts, California. He was born in South Korea and lives and works in Seoul.

Gordon Shrigley recently exhibited work at the Centre for Recent Drawing, Vine Space Gallery, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Museum of Modern Art, Saint Etienne and at the Schloss Solitude gallery, Stuttgart. He was born in the United Kingdom and lives and works in London.

Filmarmalade is an artists run project established to publish on DVD selected artists’ films and video works, so as to encourage a wider access to the moving image and to allow a greater understanding, through specially commissioned interviews, of how each artist situates their work, in relation to the history of art and contemporary fine art practice.

filmarmalade.co.uk

Still from ‘Preemptive Disappearance’ by Francisca Benitez

The first in a series of artist’s film and video screenings at IMT in collaboration with Filmarmalade.

The series will present film and video works selected by Filmarmalade beginning with a screening of ‘Preemptive Disappearance’ by Francisca Benitez.

Francisca Benitez’s ‘Preemptive Disappearance’, describes the effects of the Patriot Act on artists living in New York as told through the tender recounting of the experience of someone who discovers, when returning home one day, that her husband has been arrested for taking photographs ‘in the wrong place’. Benitez’s film slowly draws us into the emotional turmoil and sense of loss that is felt when someone close to you disappears and allows us a powerful and dramatic insight into the personal insecurity suffered by many people after 9/11. ‘Preemptive Disappearance’ is published by Filmarmalade as a limited edition of 50.

The screening will include an interview with Francisca Benitez by Katie Guggenheim and Dan Smith, specially commissioned by Filmarmalade’s curator Gordon Shrigley and included with this edition.

Still from ‘An interview with Francisca Benitez’ by Gordon Shrigley

Francisca Benitez recently exhibited work at the Westport Arts Centre, Connecticut, Exit Art, New York, Smack Mellon, New York, Centre de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona, Valenzuela Klenner Galería, Bogotá and at the Storefront for Art & Architecture, New York. She was born in the Chile and lives and works in New York.

Gordon Shrigley recently exhibited work at the Centre for Recent Drawing, Vine Space Gallery, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Museum of Modern Art, Saint Etienne and at the Schloss Solitude gallery, Stuttgart. He was born in the United Kingdom and lives and works in London.

Filmarmalade is an artists run project established to publish on DVD selected artists’ films and video works, so as to encourage a wider access to the moving image and to allow a greater understanding, through specially commissioned interviews, of how each artist situates their work, in relation to the history of art and contemporary fine art practice.

filmarmalade.co.uk

Click on image for slide show.

Between Gallery and Bookshop was a talk with Gordon Shrigley, Emily Speed and Kelly Wellman on artists’ books to coincide with an exhibition of books by artists’ collective AM BRUNO at the bookartbookshop. The talk addresses questions of distribution and display context for artists who use books as a medium for creative practice. How do different contexts of distribution affect the creation of and engagement with artists` books? Between Gallery and Bookshop attempted to look at artists’ books via the channels through which they reach their readers.

In addition to the talk the gallery was open from noon on the 25th of April with books by members of AM BRUNO.

Gordon Shrigley runs Marmalade and Filmarmalade, publishers of contemporary works of visual theory in the form of either drawing, text, photography or video. Both the artists’ book publisher Marmalade, and the video DVD label Filmarmalade grew out of a desire to promote and distribute works that allow artists the space to ‘think the visual [. . .] through the act of a sustained looking, talking and working with and through media’.

Emily Speed is an artist based in Liverpool. She founded and coordinated Liverpool Artists’ Book Fair in 2008 and is part of the artist-led space Wolstenholme Projects. Her website can be found at www.emilyspeed.com

Kelly Wellman has an MA in artists` books. She teaches at Camberwell and runs bookartbookshop with Tanya Peixoto.

Between Gallery and Bookshop was organised by artists collective AM BRUNO and IMT Gallery. AM BRUNO is an alliance of 24 artists initiated by MA fine art graduates from Central Saint Martins. AM BRUNO represents current artistic thought, practice and sensibility translated and expanded into book art form. The artists in the group are visual and conceptual practitioners in all media, including painting, photography, video, performance and sculpture. The themes vary from inquiry into the nature of books/sketchbooks, human body/desire/private life, the value of artificiality, writing/image and time.

An exhibition of artists’ books by AM BRUNO will also be held at the bookartbookshop from 25 April - 2nd May 2009.