Articles in the Art[icle]s Category
Art[icle]s, Observations »

Mangled metal bars jut out onto the pavement, as if a wild animal had ripped open its cage. The creature responsible, however, is a mechanical beast.
This is the view of guardrails I encounter on one of my regular cycling routes through the borough of Brent.
I witness the evolution of them as they appear more twisted and destroyed, then are removed, and replaced entirely, only for the new rails to be disfigured again a few days later.
As the moonlight shines through these bars, their distorted transformation is mesmerising, making my …
Art[icle]s, Features »

“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, no to imperialism and no to Putin! This was never more apparent than when poets took a stand in London on 27 March at the JW3 centre, to raise funds for Ukraine in a Poem-a-Thon. Sponsored poets read in relay …
Art[icle]s, Observations »

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 number of them to come across if you think of how short that time period is.
This is of course just a microcosm of a bigger issue and a report released this year by Greenpeace states that “Since masks became compulsory, it’s estimated …
Art[icle]s, Features »

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 basis. And some of us, like the artist known as EnterHUMAN, highlight the issue in their work.
Guardians: the school we lived in, was her insightful documentary photography exhibition, that took place at the BSMT Gallery space from 19 to 23 May. It highlighted the …
Art[icle]s »

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 only got skulls, demons, monsters and no messiahs!
Art[icle]s »

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 going all week with many categories. That night I saw the screenings of the New Shorts Lo-budget mayhem category. The LSFF’s website had this to say about the category: “ […] a selection of 26 out-there gems from bad taste …
Art[icle]s »

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 road to Damascus moment that made him see the error of his ways. In his former job he was forced to be a hater inventing negative sensationalist stories on Muslims. He stood up, said enough, had his resignation letter …
Art[icle]s »

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, and what the future holds for an art graduate. The 24-year-old graduated last year with a BA in Illustration, from the Camberwell College of Art. His distinct look is a colourful bandana tied around his forehead to keep his wild …
Art[icle]s »

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 the fiction route. Eva-Marie Elg, 30, who came to London in 2003 from just outside the industrial town of Borlänge in Sweden, took the documentary route.
Edward’s film Got Got, shot in colour with a running time of just under 13 minutes, was …
Alternative Issue, Art[icle]s »

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 enter into this death obsession.
What is death? It is one of the only few things in life that is certain and can be at any time. Richard Harris’ exhibition cleverly explores both the gruesome and creepy side of death along …
Alternative Issue, Art[icle]s »

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. That’s where Alternative London Founder Gary Means has set up shop. Or stop.
His white graffiti covered Alternative London double-decker bus is parked in a lock on Rivington Street, EC2.
Alternative London provides street art tours, bike tours and workshops led by …
Alternative Issue, Art[icle]s »

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 were born and raised in a refugee camp felt fed up with being voiceless and quiet. They decided to sing about their life, their struggle and about the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Their lyrics are strong and often aggressive in describing …
Art[icle]s »

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, painting of a gigantic penis on a drawbridge in front of the headquarters of the Federal Security Service in St Petersburg.
While the group has more than sixty members since its creation in 2006 the movie focuses on the core of …
Art[icle]s »

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 hundreds of images in the documentary are from TV and archive footage and revolve around a North Korean scientist, whose identity has been concealed, who explains under different headings what is wrong with the western world.
From reality TV shows to …
Art[icle]s »

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 by the side of the highway, hitchhiking their way down to the South of France. Broke and homeless, father and son settle at the sister’s modest house in Antibes.
Ali’s boxing skills gets him a job as a bouncer in a …
Art[icle]s »

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 Oke to the guitarist Phil Manzenera of Roxy Music, who he then collaborated and recorded music with. Recently, Oke has been picked for the line-up at Brian Eno’s Punkt festival in Kristiansand, Norway in September.
I met Ebe Oke for an …
Art[icle]s »

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 destroyed, no more five year plans or even just wondering what shopping you need to do for next week. Every second could be your last and the futility of knowing you have no say in that envelops you, numbs you. …
Art[icle]s, Censorship Issue »

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 Iranian photographer working at the Museum of Photography in Tehran.
“Voices of the other half” covers a wide range of women’s identities and issues women are concerned with in their lives in Iran. One of the girls in the project has …
Art[icle]s »

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 Kong theme park known for its dolphin shows.
The events were organised by the HKBU branch of Aiesec, a global student exchange scheme. Vriko Séraphina Kwok, head organiser of the events said:
“It took six months of hard work, lack of sleep and thousands …
Art[icle]s, Censorship Issue »

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 the torsos and bombers in the between the cheerful colours. The other side of “paradise” in Gaza is a complex reality of suicide
The artist Laila Shawa was born in Gaza in 1940 and just 8 years old when the State …
Art[icle]s »

“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. Leung and Henry Tang, aka “the pig and the wolf” will be battling for the 1200 votes of the Hong Kong election committee. Leung, the wolf, has been described by top Chinese leaders as “very patriotic”, but the public are more …
Art[icle]s, Independence Issue »

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 organisers who were involved in the Socialist book fair, which no longer exists, and as anarchists they felt that they wanted their own event that represented them. Like all book fairs, this was to be a place where likeminded people …
Art[icle]s, Europe Issue »

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 up Nazi railways and trains. As well as that he is also Jewish and with the Nazi occupation of France in the 1940s these two points did obviously not put him in good stead with the occupiers. The Gestapo did …
Art[icle]s »

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 art deco theatre in Bounders Green, East London.Vaughn Smith, the founder of the Frontline Club (Click link to see video of event) and personal friend of Assange, coined it, “the largest Frontline event to date.”
About 2000 people turned up and at …
Art[icle]s, Europe Issue »

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 their songs which is then punctuated by experimental jagged guitar riffs that pull you back into this plane.
It was a hot 29-degree Sunday night and I went to watch their gig at Hoxton Bar and Kitchen. I walked into a …
Art[icle]s, Independence Issue »

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 Republic”. In 2006, however, Days of Glory [Bouchareb’s previous movie] had a warmer welcome. On the day of its release, the French prime minister announced his good deed: he promised to surviving veterans from ex-colonies that their pensions would be aligned with …
Art[icle]s, Independence Issue »

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 at some points almost defying gravity, David set a chaotic and non-stop pace for the band, only stopping his singing to break-dance to the guitar solos. The gig in Barfly was their second of three in London in the bands UK …
Art[icle]s, Independence Issue »

“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 up the battle against the “official theatre world” of the West end by performing at a dance school in Greenwich, London.
Shown at the Bonnie Bird Theatre, Traces featured three dancers – Sarah Armstrong (German), Wei-Shan Lai (Chinese), Elisabeth Schilling (Danish) …