Phantoms of a Libertine is Ben Rivers’ second exhibition at Kate MacGarry and features a new 10 minute, 16mm film and a series of black and white photographs.

Glamorous destinations are hand-scrawled in ink beside black and white photographs: Acapulco, Haifa, Marseille, New York. Fragments of fading figures are taped to the yellowing pages of the album. This was a life documented and remembered, but the man who made the album departed a year ago. Now his flat sits silent and heavy, crammed with animistic artefacts, books, collages of broken stone figures, collected and created over decades spent travelling the world for Time & Life Magazine. The photo albums are fragile and threaten to fall apart, the talismans are removed from their intended rituals, the dust is more dominant, more all-consuming, than the sense of a living present. Since the departure of its occupant, the flat has become a museum, rather than a mausoleum, a shrine to what has past.

Ben Rivers was a friend of the anonymous subject of this brand new body of work, which transforms tokens of experience into a series of clues to a mystery that must remain unsolved. History is made by how it is classified, organized, and recorded; here the artist assumes control over what Michel Foucault deemed “the order of things.” Inspired partly by Marcel Broadthaers’ Voyage On The North Sea(1974), Rivers uses 16mm film to archive the found-imagery of an elusive biography. While Rivers’ recent work has focused on individuals and communities within hermetic or utopian worlds, here he revisits themes of his earlier works, such as House (2005/7), which illuminate the power of deserted space. Neither morbid nor sentimental, Rivers’ narrative flickers into view and then disperses, as thick and opaque as the clouds of dust that fill the atmosphere of the empty flat. Both cryptic and startling, combining fictional elements with documentary content, focusing on the detail rather than the panorama of a life, the film, photos and objects are an exploration into what is left behind.

Measure worked with Ben on the touring exhibition On Overgrown Paths.

www.katemacgarry.com

Old Fire Station has been a community center for the local Stoke Newington area since 1982. The building has provided spaces for many groups over the years, currently it has two permanent tenants; the Fire Station Nursery and Growing Communities who grow and distribute locally grown produce and have run the farmers market since 2003.

We aim to invite local community groups and businesses to collaborate on events and workshops creating a vibrant, engaging destination for N16.

If you’d like more information on the studios and the main hall space please email us at:

info@measure.org.uk

The fate of the two buildings separated soon after, as the West Pier burnt into the sea and Wilton’s was revitalised by director Frances Mayhew and her dedicated team and continues to be one of the most beautiful venues in London.

Over ten years ago before the West Pier in Brighton was destroyed by storms and fire, wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson and sound designer Thor McIntyre Burnie were given permission to rig up microphones in what had once been the grand concert hall. During the day, the pier was a dangerous place to venture, but on a winter’s night, as dusk fell, and the sea glowed red, it was transformed into a magical scene as tens of thousands of starlings gathered in the air above, performing their aerial acrobatics (murmurations) before descending onto the pier to roost for the night. The starlings roosted in what remained of the concert hall, and it was the sounds of these birds gathered in their night roost, which Chris and Thor wanted to capture – from dusk until dawn, when the birds departed once again on their feeding trips.

It was no easy task rigging up the concert hall with microphones. “When the wind blew” Chris said, “chunks literally fell off and were tossed into the sea like autumn leaves”. They rigged up an array of different microphones as they wanted to capture both the sense of space; the atmosphere of the concert hall, as well as close up sounds of the birds themselves. As dusk approached the first birds arrived over the pier. In time, they descended into the concert hall, and an extraordinary performance began; the sounds of tens of thousands of performers gathered together. Today the West Pier no longer exists except for some skeletal fragments. The starlings have passed into history, but what’s left are the recordings. They are the recordings of a Ghost Roost.

Listen to The Ghost Roost on the Radio 4 website here.

Listen here to ‘A Pier at Wilton’s’ recorded at Wilton’s Music Hall during Me and My Shadow in May 2005.

An exhibition bringing together a selection of work from the last 10 years by the contemporary British sculptor Cathie Pilkington inspired by the Museum’s collections, the artist has borrowed ideas and memories from many of the toys on display to assist her own three dimensional cast of strange creatures and well-known characters from popular fairy tales.

Works featured include Little Red Riding Hood, The Wonderful Story of the Tar Baby (both 2011) and Singerie (2004).

Private View Tea Party: Saturday, 21 January 15:30 – 17:30pm

V&A Museum of Childhood
Cambridge Heath Road
London E2 9PA

www.museumofchildhood.org.uk

As the smoke of smouldering cinders from this summer’s riots lingers in the air we hear the sound of raked seating being unbolted from the The Lord Mayors Parade. Against this backdrop with all its gilded pomp and lollipop glory neatly screening the fledgling feathers of the protest camp at St Paul’s, Harriet Murray installs her new exhibition Anomaly Island.

Conjuring multiple references through an English history from Daniel Defoe to Nick Clegg, Anomaly Island draws us to uneasy shores. Murray’s new installation raises questions by the handful and unloads them at our feet.

Personal psychology and thought are individual outcrops surrounded by oceans. We are islands of neuro-linguistic flowerings, electro-chemical broth, where life choices must be negotiated through a maze of ‘nurture’ neurons, ‘nature’ quarks and daily bombardment by symbols of corporatized power and culture.

Life goes on, we go to work, we butter the toast, but what happens when our compliance barometer begins to beep and we recalibrate our assumptions and shred old expectations?

Murray’s new work explores the complex relationships between, the known self and the revealed self, between first world comforts and the desire to escape its suffocation, our need for community and our longing for peace, solitude and time to reflect. Making a home, is at the heart of what it is to be human, making a shelter is a matter of survival. For what is a bird without a nest?

Teetering on an edge between a glamorous glance to an idealized existence and a very human struggle of survival, Anomaly Island presents us with three distinctive artworks brought together at Campbell Works. An ‘Englishman’s castle’ made from patriotic vegetable boxes filled with a lifetime of memorabilia, a ghostly raft that offers to transport us through the veil, and an elegiac video of perennial calm. “et domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium [and each man's home is his safest refuge].”

Click here for more infomation.

Jason Smith set up Fontsmith in 1999, initially working on corporate identities. Over the next few years, the agency designed a series of typefaces, released in 2001 as the Fontsmith Library. Since then, the company has not looked back and now employs five staff and has a long list of cool clients like UEFA Champions League, Channel 4, BBC and Telefonica for whom it produces bespoke type. The Fontsmith Library currently has 23 typefaces and includes modern greats such as FS Lola, FS Me, FS Albert, FS Sally and FS Joey.

Fontsmith were invited to create a font for the exhibition Chord in 2009. Measure wished to extend the creative process to all aspects of the exhibition, and a bespoke font for an exhibition was a long held ambition of ours. After a visit to the artists studio and discussions with Measure, Phil Garnham from Fontsmith created several treatments utilising themes from the construction of the work which were then worked into the final design.

More infomation here.

To book tickets please visit: http://www.bfi.org.uk/lff/node/1830

A delicate and witty portrait of Jake, an outsider who lives in the wilderness of his own creation.

Using old 16mm cameras, artist Ben Rivers, who has been nominated for the Jarman Prize and has won a Tiger Award at Rotterdam, creates work from stories of real people, often those who have disconnected from the normal world and taken themselves into wilderness territories.

His new long-form work extends his relationship with Jake, a man first encountered in his short film This Is My Land. The title refers to the work Jake did in order to finance his chosen state of existence. He lives alone in a ramshackle house, in the middle of the forest. It’s full of curiosities from a bygone age, including a beloved old gramophone. We see his daily life across the seasons, as he occupies himself going for walks in all weathers, and taking naps in the misty fields and woods. Endlessly resourceful, he builds a raft to fish in a loch. Jake has a tremendous sense of purpose, however eccentric his behaviour seems to us. The presence of the camera is irrelevant to him; he has no desire for human contact, and is completely at home in his environment, the nature around him and his constructed abode.

Rivers’ gracefully-constructed film creates an intimate connection with an individual who would otherwise be a complete outsider to us.

Helen de Witt

The Sculpture Park at Frieze Art Fair is located in the beautiful surroundings of the English Garden. It is within a three-minute walk of the main fair site and exhibits new works by both established and emerging artists represented by Frieze Art Fair exhibitors. This year, curator David Thorp once again selected the Sculpture Park. Entry to the Sculpture Park is free to the public.

David Thorp, selector of the Sculpture Park at Frieze Art Fair commented, ‘This year’s Sculpture Park continues to provide a fascinating cross section of sculpture being made today from the monumental to the socially engaged. The twelve works on display by established and emerging artists build on a dialogue begun in previous years, developing a debate about art in public places and the condition of sculpture as an evolving conversation that proceeds by example, as an exchange of ideas between artists and artworks.’

This year the following artists will be exhibiting in the Sculpture Park:
Neha Choksi
Johan Creten
Claudia Fontes
Alicia Framis
Tom Friedman
Gimhongsok
Des Hughes
Thomas Houseago
Eva Koťátková & Petr Koťátko
Will Ryman
Kiki Smith
Gavin Turk

Listeners can tune in online for the live broadcast, 4 – 5 pm on 15 October at www.luckyPDF.com

The narrator is here to show and instruct on the use of misdirection and diversion, as aids in concealing the modus operandi of the feat, the vital sleight or subtlety employed. The narrator becomes part of a composite image, where the spaces in which he appears slide across each other like shuffling a pack of cards.

Open 12-6pm Thurs, Fri and Sat (other days open by appointment only)
30 Queensdown Rd
London E5 8NN

WW Gallery is pleased to present House Guests, a new installation by Liane Lang.

This new work takes its cue from the preserved or recreated living or working spaces of famous figures, designed to allow the viewer to enter temporarily into the past – a museum to the individual life. The projected film is an animation made in Rudyard Kipling’s Vermont house, the site of many traumatic events for his family but also where he wrote many of his best-loved books. The haunting atmosphere of the film gently spills over into the exhibition space, where strange objects, piles of books, pieces of furniture and photographs extend the narrative.

The film animation was made at Naulakha, the house of Rudyard Kipling in Vermont, an isolated building in the Connecticut River Valley. Kipling built this house to his own designs and lived here with his wife and daughters. The space we see is haunted, occupied by inhabitants that appear and vanish, furniture that moves of its own accord and disembodied voices that play in the overgrown swimming pool. In the exhibition space, found objects are arranged like haunted souls along the walls, hinting at the dark side of Kipling’s times and thoughts, the confusion and conflict of colonialism, travel and friendship as well as racism and arrogance, a boy’s adventure tale and the horrors of war.

www.wilsonwilliamsgallery.com