Hetain Patel Launch

Name: Alice Thickett


Age: 23


Job on the blog: General Overseer


Favourite creative: 
Keith Tyson. And any geek that works with Data Visualisation.


A bit about you and what you do: 
I work at the NAE on the front desk so you'll see me about. I manage a project group called No Official Name and try to make time to make my own artwork and buy other people's! 

LAUNCH AND RE-LAUNCH!

So with tonight being the launch of the new main gallery exhibition at NAE from Hetain Patel, WE'RE RELAUNCHING THE BLOG!!

Our first posts will welcome some of the new team who are going to work hard to keep the blog going! They're a nice bunch!

If you have anything to say about art or the NAE, get in touch by emailing alice@nae.org.uk

Tara for now mi ducks!

Some words from our director...

“…Launching 2012 with Rashid Rana is thrilling. Rana works out of Lahore, Pakistan and brings to the UK a body of work challenging the representation of photography within objects. His practice is informed and contextualised by paradox and contradiction, capturing simplicities, extremities and opposing perspectives in his art. Rashid’s work is shockingly brilliant in both size and concepts. He is recognised as one of the most significant artists from the South Asian region. His work of course transcends borders and his place in contemporary visual art is recognised globally. With his entourage of enthusiasts, he could be likened to a travelling rock star; apt considering contemporary Pakistan’s fascination with rock music. We have a full program of films, talks, performances, workshops and debates responding to the array of complexities highlighted in Rashid’s work…”

Skinder Hundal

Culture Cloud - The Birth of the idea Part 2

The Birth of the idea Part 2

Returning from MAC (Midlands Art Centre) I distributed the notes I had collected between a team of NAE staff we had chosen to work on the cloud project. We had Andy Lindley our Technical Manager, Skinder Hundal our chief executive, Ravi Abbott (Me) project Assistant and Islam Muhammad EVS Volunteer. We sat around a table and started discussing what we thought the aims of the project would be and what NESTA would want. We found three very important points that would change our direction of thinking thus changing the project outcomes. The first point was that they were not focusing on new methods of creating interactive art and displaying it. This meant that the idea of interactive screens or robotic heads was not viable.  The Second important point was that they wanted a testable proposition, this meant that we could not make it over complex and it had to be created with current technology. The final important point was that they wanted control to be in the hands of the audience, this would mean it needed to be interactive but that interactivity must count towards something.

We became more focused on the cloud idea, this seems to be the idea that could be made less complicated. With making it a testable proposition we could achieve it by doing it on a much smaller scale then the initial idea. We could simply have one initial cloud based around the NAE area. We could allow artists to upload and share work. We decided to choose visual arts as an initial platform as arts as a subject matter is so wide spread it would be very complex to organise it and pointless for a trail.

We still did not have a name. We were coming up with different ideas, combinations of cloud and community. After jokingly suggesting Boy George’s ‘Culture Club’ we simple swapped the club for cloud. This seemed to fit and roll off the tongue well.

We still needed to define the idea, we had a good base for an online community but how do we bring this community into the gallery space (this is the whole aim of the project). We came up with lots of ideas such as interactive boards, displaying art works on the tram, projection on the side of the NAE. Eventually Andy Lindley suggested we simply made a box in the gallery space. This box would display the works digitally and people could come and see their work displayed in the gallery space.  This box would contain a Pc with a high quality screen or projector. We named this simply ‘media box’

This idea was strong but we felt it would not appeal to people who were not used to or unsure of visiting an art space. We needed something extra to pull them in. Skinder decided to get some advice from art companies and contacts he knew. 

Part 3 Coming soon

by Ravi James Abbott Project Assistant

Culture cloud – Birth of the Idea Part 1

Birth of the idea Part 1

When Skinder first asked me to help on a digital project, I was excited but unsure how an art centre with such a traditional style of visual arts would be able to achieve this.

Previous tech projects I have been involved with were mostly self funded community websites, or involved working with small groups of people who met online to create a gaming community. These sites were great. I learnt a lot about what makes a community successful and what can make it divided. All of this work had a fairly loose structure and was very much a spare-time thing.

When presented with the challenge, Skinder and I started brainstorming to come up with ideas. The initial ideas were strong but a few were pretty obscure - particularly the giant robot head on the side of NAE that used image recognition software to scan people and then greet them with their name.

We soon whittled it down to one pretty complex, but strong concept. This was spurred on by suggestions from the wider team at NAE and the idea became more defined. We thought: ‘what can NAE offer to help bring people into the centre?’ The answer we came to was the community. If we could filter this amazingly diverse and talented community into a showcase of some kind, people would see how vibrant the place is, or be drawn to the centre via a route they would not usually have taken.

We started off thinking about areas and fixing the location to capture the local community’s content and display it. We initially thought of simply drawing a square of a mile around the area on map and then collecting the data and displaying it at an event.

We soon realised that this was very limited, as we would keep getting similar content and it could go stagnant. We also found a similar art project called square mile (guess great minds think alike). This is when we thought that the square could expand and retract. Then we thought that the shape of the square was too restrictive. What if somebody wanted to join and lived just outside the edge of the boundary? So we decided to ditch the square idea, so the shape could change and even move across and overlap other locations.

‘Cloud’ is a very popular word online at the moment. With products such as iCloud by Apple storing people’s content in remote virtual locations. It’s very relevant. This coupled with the idea that clouds move, expand, retract helped cement the idea.

With this idea planted in my head, I was sent to The NESTA digital day in Birmingham at Midlands Arts Centre (MAC). It was my first art conference/debate event and my first time in Brum. They had some great examples of projects and ideas and gave us some very vital information. We discussed everything from the online record industry, to social networking. I enjoyed it a lot and stuffed my face with sandwiches and fruit whilst having a look around MAC.

Part 2 Coming soon


by Ravi James Abbott Project Assistant

Review by Simon Raven

LEO ASEMOTA

THE ENS PROJECT’S FIRST PRINCIPLES

16th September - 26th NOVEMBER

Reviewed by Simon Raven

A complex and unusual collection of artworks, mimicking the formal language of a museum display, was spread across two floors of the New Art Exchange's exhibition spaces. Nigerian born and London based artist, Leo Asemota's exhibition gathered works in a range of media, including photography, video, sculpture, performance and drawing, made during varying distinct phases of an ongoing artistic investigation. The 'ENS Project' in its various interconnected parts uses the historic relations between Britain and Benin as a lens through which to consider the influence of technological, social and cultural phenomena on the psyche, whilst also enacting both a loss and ritualistic reclamation of identity.

The audience is invited, via a small sign, to enter and read the exhibition in a particular narrative order. Our journey begins with a haunted act of erasure: a wall piece featuring 35 heavily framed Polaroid photographs, in which a face-shot of the protagonist (presumably the artist) has been bleached white - an effect which might be achieved by holding a camera flash too close to the subject, and which might be suggestive of an interrogation or blinding act. Each erased head becomes a lunar mirror, reminiscent for me of the smooth blank chip in a scrabble set, which can stand for any letter. Indeed, one of the meanings of 'ENS', of the exhibition title, is a unit of measurement for the space taken up by a letter type.

The 35 photographic images/moons are hung in a grid, sculpturally evocative of a giant computer keyboard. From this vantage point it is possible to imagine each deleted face as a large white thumb-print, pressed into an alphabet of erasure. One missing image at the corner of the grid hints at a deeper theft and etymology for the work. The 35 blank faces alludes to the number of bronze heads looted from statues in pre-colonial Benin during a punitive expedition by the British in 1897 (the heads were taken to cover the cost of the expedition, and no doubt as a symbolic act by one 'head of state' on another) Each head was stolen from a statue of an African King relating to the practice of Igue, in which the head is worshipped as a site of communion with ancestors and gods. In writing, and at the exhibition, I found myself imagining a giant, headless bronze statue of an African King, typing a story of blank white faces with large thumbs: a lunar script of identity theft and erasure. Less dramatically, the work also conjures allusion to performance documentation by Tehching Hsieh, who, from 1978-9, punched a clock every hour for a year, and the godfather of the Polaroid, Andy Warhol, who took pictures of his own blank face among multiple society portraits. All of which have a contemporary counterpart in online social networking sites, which provide platforms for countless projects in which the protagonist photographs them-self every day for a year, enacting the anonymous mechanisation of subjective identity and loss.

Along the next wall were hung a line of drawings again framed in a way that was suggestive of computer keys or typography (this time in red and white, colours of blood). The images, delicately made with coal and white chalk, formed a lexicon of symbolic exchange and alchemical process. Among them were diagrams of mutability, and the beautiful phrase, 'I am the reason for my parents existence'. A complex and expansive web of mystical signifiers: diagrams, patterns and moons, hinted at a close study of archetypal imagery, alongside the formation and unpacking of symbols consistent with a deep exploration of identity and spiritual rebirth. A form of powdered white chalk (orhue) used in drawings, performances and sculptures throughout the exhibition, relates to Olokun Worship, practised by the Edo people of Nigeria. Olokun, god of the sea, is a powerful, benevolent deity, considered greater even than Oba, god of the land. In Olokun ritual white chalk is used as a tool for invoking prayer, both in drawings and in combination with objects, dances and musical rites, often involving an act of erasure (and perhaps an inhabiting of the 'ENS' space itself).

Following the drawings is a video of a performance made as a radio broadcast. The video is shown without sound, but can be heard by following a link on the NAE website. As such, the viewer is invited into a circular narrative in which formal arrangements are inverted: radio is traditionally heard and not seen, video is seen and not heard. Another blank space created and filled.

Several sculptural objects housed on plinths and under clear, plastic vitrine cases, included a chess set carved from chalk and coal, and a bible-jacket encrusted with coal. The formal arrangements of these works, and the colours black, white and gold, reminded me of modernist works by Constantin Brancusi, or props gathered from a lecture by Joseph Beuys. Their museological mode of display provided some distance from this reading, and an element of parody which might have been developed with accompanying texts.

Upstairs in the Mezzanine gallery three further components of the 'ENS' project were displayed in an order dictated by the sectioning of the poured concrete floor into three distinct areas. The first contained detailed drawings, or plans, for a performance in which Asemota re-walked the path of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee parade (on the same date even) through London. Navigational sketches and diamond shapes made from coal provided clues to the historical path and objective of the work.

Shown on a monitor at the end of the space was a film of four Nigerian men, dressed in highly formal, militaristic wear (maroon berets, sunglasses, black leather suits, braiding, boots) performing a ritual promenade, carrying four corners of a religious object: a rusted votive ship or anchor, with pale blue lace rigging, encasing a clasped heart of white chalk. The sombre procession paused at various monuments to Queen Victoria, and in The National Portrait Gallery, where rituals involving chalk and various other objects were enacted. A sense of reclaiming a political past, with symbolic connotations far beyond those normally associated with art, were created. In addition to psycho-geographic performances, I couldn't help also thinking of Eddie Murphy's movie, 'Coming to America', in which white preconceptions of African heritage are brilliantly parodied and subverted. Each participant in the performance took their turn to read texts suggestive of Britain's colonial past, including one by Rudyard Kipling, which were printed and exhibited alongside the film, and the ritual boat/sculpture housed in a large glass case.

'ENS Project' is an ongoing and fascinating work, to which I am indebted for the opportunity to discover aspects of Nigerian culture and British history which until visiting the New Art Exchange I knew nothing about. It is interesting to see the work sited outside London, in a city with a history of mining both coal and gypsum, which is also a form of white chalk. The show runs until 26th November, and I recommend a visit, particularly when there is a talk to help unpack some of the shows complex but ultimately rewarding religious, artistic and historical narratives.