Articles in ART[icle]S
Fighting Words: Poets for Ukraine
“He sits at his table long as a fable planning a banquet of death too sharp are his claws too aglow are his eyes Putin of the great war cry dragging his carcass of history.”
The war in Ukraine has brought together a unified international stance that is saying no to conflict, …
Photo Essay: One Picture Tells…Masks on the Ground
Disturbed by the number of masks of varying types that I have seen since the pandemic when walking around London I decided to do a small experiment.
I wanted to see just how many I could find within 15 minutes. Without barely even looking I found six. This is a disturbing …
An old school in Hackney and Hammond’s budget speech: surviving London’s housing crisis
The first time that the Tory Party finally mentioned the housing crisis, since the snap election, was during Hammond’s November budget. However unlike these elitists, who clearly only care about their influential wealthy friends, most of us deal with the problem of affordable housing in this city and country on an every day …
Seek and Ye Shall Find: How to Resurrect Images of Messiahs and the Dark Side
I laughed myself silly on this Telegraph piece on how people have resorted to make money or to prove the existence of a supernatural being. Try photoshop, vinegar art, and just plain coincidence.
So I tried an experiment and found my own faces without trick photography or fabrication, problem was I …
London Short Film Festival 2015: cats, cool, clever, creepy and some…just plain crap!
It was a cold Tuesday and high above the hustle and bustle of Mare Street people reclined in couches in the Hackney Picture House Cinema to watch the young and the old showcase their films at the LSFF. The festival, which this year ran from 9 to18 January, had been …
The Truth is out There: One Rogue Reporter Documentary Review
Press, smut peddlers have their whole operation opened and dissected by Rich Peppiatt, former tabloid reporter, in a new documentary called One Rogue Reporter. Shown as part of the films of the East End Film Festival at the Rio Cinema in Dalston last weekend.
Peppiatt worked for the Daily Star tabloid until …
A Matter of Chance: The Artist Daniel Ginns and his Evolving Mediums
Daniel Ginns expresses his artistic versatility through continuous line drawings and Mark Rothko wall photos. Recent work was for the Tate Britain as part of a project created by Scottish artist Alan Johnston called Tactile Geometry.
Ginns and I went for a cup of tea to talk about nature over nurture, chance, …
Portrayals of Gang Youth Violence: Two Short Films at the Rio Cinema, London
One of London’s last independent cinemas, the Rio in Dalston, hosted shorts by two visionary women filmmakers at a private screening on Sunday 21 July.
The two directors portrayed gang life in the city through different approaches. Dionne Edwards, 27, from Bristol, who moved to London when she was 18, took …
International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) 2012: Four Days, Two Smartphones [Video]
Our adventures in Amsterdam documented in this video as well as an interview with Slavko Martinov director of the documenatry Propaganda which you can also read about in this review.
Video: Christian Jensen, Text: Mark A. Silberstein, Edit: Jenya Vyaltseva
Alternative Issue: An Alternative to Life – Welcome Collection, Death a Self Portrait
A skeleton leans sideways on a park bench, the essence of where life once was now just bare bones remain. As you look up a spectacular chandelier made of 3000 plaster cast bones by British artist Jodie Carey hangs eerily from the high exhibition ceiling and strikes you as you …
Alternative Issue: Old Walls come to Life with Injection of New Culture
Illegal street art has been plastered on the walls of London’s East End for many years. The formerly known working class district is slowly transforming into a street art Mecca.
You only have to take a turn into a side street along Old Street to find a piece from the movement. …
Alternative Issue: Palestinian Hip-Hop a Product of its Environment
Out of great hardship comes great art. From the heart of a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, a defiant voice is crying for freedom and justice.
In the narrow alleyways of Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem, a Palestinian Hip Hop band was born in 2007. Three young rappers who …
Planet Issue: Peacepainting – Catrine Gangstø
Catrine Gangstø leading a Peacepainting workshop.
Peacepainting is an organisation that exists to remind the adult world what it means to think like a child. Using the same format, same frames and same canvas’s children across the world are taking part in painting workshops to express themselves.
“Children think what they say …
Alternative Issue: Dark Parks – the Photos of Stjepan Sedlar
Seeing the world through Stjepan Sedlar’s eyes requires a lot of patience and having no fear of the dark. His parents are from Croatia and this Hamburg born photographer, who lives in Berlin, would stray into parks at night taking colour photos without lighting.
It is late afternoon on a cold Sunday in …
International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) 2012: Russian Dissent Expressed through Art Picks up Pace
Voina, a Russian artivist collective specalising in provocative street art against state control, has released a documentary which recently screened at the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA).
The film, Tomorrow, chronicles the history of the group from their early beginnings as shoplifting squatters to their biggest and most controversial piece, …
International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) 2012: Propaganda North Korean Style
Propaganda is a documentary purported to have been made in North Korea with images of decadent western lifestyle, capitalist culture and a message of salvation. A couple claiming to be North Korean dissidents approached a translator in Seoul handing her a DVD on condition that she translate and disseminate it.
All the …
Health Issue: Blind Art Exhibition – Seeing is Believing?
Moorfields Eye Hospital shows the world’s only collection of art for the blind. The unique exhibition consists of more than 20 pieces that appeal to the tactile sense and makes a bold statement that sight is not essential for enjoying art.
The artists used different materials but also vivid colours to …
Sex Issue: The Male Nude – A Declining Subject in Art
In the 80s the artists group Guerrilla Girls scattered New York with posters claiming that only 5 per cent of artists in the Metropolitan Museum were women but 83% of all nudes were female.
The number of female artists has increased since then but most nudes in modern art are still …
Rust & Bone Film Review
Two years after his hard-hitting crime drama A Prophet, Jacques Audiard is back with a moving love story that unites against all odds a recent amputee and an underground street fighter.
It starts off like an American road-movie: Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), a hefty Belgian bloke and his five-year-old son are standing …
One Small Step for Amy Hanson, a Big Step for Nicaragua
Amy Hanson, director of the organisation Big Steps talks about her new documentary about the street children in Nicaragua.
Symphony of Bird Song – The Music of Ebe Oke
Before instruments there was nature, and Ebe Oke is an artist who lets certain elements of this world resound through his music.
It was this unique sound and his voice that caught the attention of Geoff Travis, the founder of Rough Trade Records, who offered the US musician a development deal. Travis introduced …
Censorship Issue: Huckleberry Finn, Looking at the Censored Book in Context
The old tale of Huckleberry Finn will be released as a new film next year but the best-loved story has had a very unpopular past.
The film currently in production, Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn, directed by Jo Kastner, combines the stories of the two books by the author Mark Twain. Huckleberry …
Isolation: A Lovecraftian-Horror Short Story
Nobody knows what they are. Or where they came from.
I’m feeling strangely calm. I guess people who have just arrived in the trenches feel the same. One day its all routine and the usual pint on Fridays and the next death surrounds you so closely. Your sense of time is …
Censorship Issue: Freedom of Expression Through Photography – Voices of the other half at the Rossi & Rossi Gallery
What does it mean to be a young woman in Iran? The Omid Foundation explores this question through enabling disadvantaged women in Iran to use photography as a means of therapy. “Voices of the other half” is the product of a workshop with eleven girls led by Shandi Ghadirian, an …
‘Journos Abroad’ Only the Japanese can Save the Dolphins
Ric O’Barry, known from the documentary “The Cove”, recognises the film has done a lot of good, yet publicity is only a first step in saving marine life.
O’Barry visited Hong Kong Baptist University for a screening of the film and to debate against Allan Zeman, chairman of Ocean Park, a Hong …
Censorship Issue: Pop Art from Palestine – Laila Shawa The Other Side of Paradise Exhibition
Headless, armless and feetless mannequins, painted in bold colours and adorned with gem stones and colourful paintings inspired by Pop Art – the first impression of Laila Shawa’s exhibition „The other Side of paradise“ is beautiful, indeed. But a closer look reveals chains and belts of munitions and dynamite on …
‘Journos Abroad’ Democracy in Hong Kong?
“People’s aspirations has galvanised a yearning for democracy” says CK Lau, lecturer at Hong Kong Baptist University and Vice-Chairman of the Journalism Education Foundation.
Yet the upcoming Hong Kong Chief Executive election seems to be anything but. Three candidates, but the media has already written off the only non-Beijing supporter Albert Ho.
C. Y. …
Independence Issue: Could Anarchism Work in the Age of Austerity? Anarchist Book Fair 2011 Review
The sound of a brass band greeted me as I walked into Queen Mary University’s Library Square for the Anarchist Book Fair. This is the fifth year running that this event has been held at the campus in Bethnal Green.
The book fair was started in 1983 by a group of …
Europe Issue: Ignited Indignation – Stéphane Hessel’s Time for Outrage! Book Review
Dynamite comes in small packages and Stéphane Hessel’s book Time for Outrage! is a testament to this, delivering an exceptionally powerful political punch in just 37 pages.
The metaphor of explosions are extremely fitting here as the author survived world war two as a resistance fighter in France amongst other things blowing …
The Largest Frontline Club Event: Julian Assange and Slavoj Žižek Talk Hosted by Amy Goodman
Wikileaks has lost its capital and possibly its founder, yet a few months ago at the Frontline club Assange seemed untouchable. The talk was between Julian Assange and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and was hosted by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! on 2 July 2011 at the Troxy, a beautiful …
Europe Issue: From Small Town to Big Sound – We Walk on Ice and their Unique East End Indie Sound
When We Walk on Ice start playing their captivating tight sound, it is hard to believe that only two souls are creating it.
Their unique Indie sound reminds me of at least two bands that I love: Cocteau Twins and Mazzy Star. We Walk on Ice have a similar ethereal feel to …
Europe Issue: A Reality of a Big Society – Red Gallery London Exhibition
An exhibition about life in a Communist-era town in the former East Germany is highlighting what its organisers claim is the real nature of the Prime Minister’s much vaunted ‘Big Society.’
The exhibition at the Red Gallery in Shoreditch displays the changing nature of the murals that once adorned the walls …
Independence Issue: Outside the (Right) Law – Film Review
A thousand people gathered on the red carpet to protest against the projection of Outside The Law, Rachid Bouchareb’s second movie about the French (de)colonisation. Among the demonstrators, far-right and right-wing elected representatives tossed off many recriminations against the movie, calling it: a “revisionist work of propaganda” and an “insult to the …
Independence Issue: A Set of New Politics for Music – Band Review
Crowded together in the dark top floor of The Barfly in Camden, the audience had not been especially turned on by the warm up band, but when lead singer David Boyd entered with a half somersault as the smoke machines exploded, the crowd went wild as well.
Never steaming down and …
Independence Issue: Traces, a Story of New Life, Both On and Off the Stage
“Traces is an investigation of the spaces that lie in the interstices of the modern world. In three poetic pictures the dancers are reclaiming a space to exist, struggling to leave traces in the nothingness that surrounds them.”
Traces, an expressionistic approach to the human experience, from birth to death, took …
