GHost: November 2010

Friday 17th December, 6pm – 10.00pm

St. John on Bethnal Green

200 Cambridge Heath Road, E2 9PA (next to Bethnal Green tube)

GHost is here once more, with another unforgettable night of artist films, performances and moving image interventions to celebrate the darkest days of the season and to welcome in the ghosts that inhabit them.

In the lofty shadows of this atmospheric John Soane church, hosts and guests become GHost-hunters bedazzled by artist films on a movie-sized screen in the nave, and haunted by moving images, transmissions, interventions and performances in the foyer, belfry and beyond...

Warming seasonal drinks will be served

NOTE: The exhibition can be viewed throughout the night 6pm - 10pm and the film screenings in the nave start at 8.30 pm.

GHosts
Nichola Bruce, Gail Burton & Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly with The East London Secular Choir, Antonia Carrara, Jo David & Alex Baker & Kit Poulson, Rebecca Feiner, Romeo Grünfelder, Michelle Hannah, Simon Hollington & Kypros Kyprianou, Theo Kaccoufa, Miyuki Kasahara, Output Arts, Matt Rowe, Manuel Saiz, Sabine Schöbel, David Secombe & Andrew Martin, Sarah Sparkes, Kate Squires, Ricarda Vidal, The Reverend Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly, The Phantom Organist, The Daughters of Gef, Neil Wissink

map here: http://tinyurl.com/33rdupu

GHost is led by Sarah Sparkes and Ricarda Vidal
http://www.ghosthostings.co.uk/
more information: ghost.hostings@gmail.co.uk
follow us on facebook:

Installations and performances around the church

Output Arts, ‘Static’, 2010, Audio installation

Using collected responses to simple questions, and the voices of the church community, Output Arts have created an audio installation specifically for GHost.
With an old transistor radio, the audience is invited to tune through the static and capture the voices being transmitted throughout the space. In the context of the church, personal memories take on a haunting, ethereal quality.
Output Arts create multi-sensory artwork for non-gallery venues. We design installations combining images, text, video and audio gathered primarily from and within the venues that are used to show the work.
We would like to thank all those who have participated in the project and particularly our readers.
www.outputarts.com

Simon Hollington & Kypros Kyprianou, ‘Evidence and values for a new age’

‘Evidence and values for a new age’ uses Super 8 film and cctv recording to document a wineglass moving across a table.
By deliberately recording the evidence in a manner that hints at old ruses, the short recording might be an attempt at evidence being faked through stop-motion, strings, panning or digital manipulation, hidden by the quality of the image. In actual fact, it is a wineglass moving across a table. Or as Lou Reed put it ‘Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see’.
http://www.electronicsunset.org/

Sarah Sparkes, 'The Infinity Box', 2010, infinity box, illuminated sign and shed, 4ft x 6ft

On entering the Belfry space the viewer is confronted with the challenge 'NEVER AFRAID’ in flashing lights, faintly illuminating the shape of a shed on which the sign is hanging. Pass through the darkness and look for a peephole in the shed door through which a portal opens out into a limitless dimension. For some years, Sarah Sparkes has been exploring the potential of these boxes, previously installing them into coffins, built to fit the artist and in this instance a garden shed. A structure which is both domestic and everyday serves as a gateway to explore our fascination for ‘other worlds’.

Sarah Sparkes is currently undertaking an IGRS research fellowship at the Harry Price Library of Magical Literature, University of London. Recent exhibitions include, ‘The Infinity Box’ a solo show at The Belfry of St Johns- London, 'Fate and Free Will' at Riverside Contemporary Art Space - California, USA and 'Sold Out' at Elastic Residence- London.

Manuel Saiz, 'A New Chance for Symbolic Dimension', Spain,

A video installation based on a scene of Ingmar Bergman's "The Magician" (Ansiktet, 1958) in which art and society, magic and art are confronted. The work uses a clever application of mechanical sorcery that creates a magic phenomenon that echoes the fakery and trickery of the film.

Manuel Saiz is an international artist and curator. Selected solo shows include Specialized Technicians Required, Galeria Moriarty, Madrid (2005), Private Party. Keep Out Castlefield Gallery Manchester, Nominal_Politics, T1+2 Artspace, London (2003) and selected group shows include Talk Show ICA London, 'Monitoring', Kassel Germany (2005), UK, East End Academy, Whitechapel gallery, London

Rebecca Feiner, 'Everyday Abandoned' & ‘LOST’

The film 'Everyday Abandoned', which is shown in the belfry’s ‘natural’ confessional booth is a series of intense visual fragments of every day abandoned hauntings & memories exploring textures and absence capturing the mystery from a child’s point of view of both horror and wonderment at their surroundings. The film has audio of train tracks and city traffic & was originated on VHS so that visually the colours bleed into soft edges. Exploring the continued theme of absence & haunting a small object-based work accompanies the film at the small curved landing entrance to the Belfry: two tiny white leather little girls shoes of the style associated with confirmations & weddings which will be spot lit- this piece is called LOST.

Theo Kaccoufa 'Dearest' Kinetic Chair

I like the idea of the mundane behaving unexpectedly.
Dearest is a haunted chair, an utilitarian object possessed by forces unseen. I have created my version of possible Victorian technologies, as used by spiritualist charlatans, to beguile, seduce and bamboozle.
In contrast to “Dearest”, a skeletal flower grows from a crack on the stairs. This piece continues from my Cyber Flora series, plant forms of exotic origins, like ghosts, barely existing on this earthly plane.
Theo Kaccoufa, together with Tom Grimsey, is currently working with scientists from Universities around the UK on the subject of Nano Technology. Calling themselves “Giants of the Infinitesimal”, they will be showing their work in 2011 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester.
http://www.theoland.com/

Miyuki Kasahara “Becoming a Ghost Healer not Hunter” 2010, Performance

I will be helping people hunt unhappy invisible ghosts. I will be asking visitors to release the ghosts’ pains or to solve their problems. Visitors will be encouraged to pick one of the ghosts at random from facedown individual cards. I will explain the particular nature of the ghost. There will be a series of objects on a table; all appropriate in someway to helping the ghosts. Participants need to choose the right item for their ghost. When they choose the item to take away with them; they need to explain and write out an instruction on how they will achieve the Ghost healing. I will ask for photos of their care as evidence that they have carried out their instruction. The results will be shown on the blog: www.ghosthealer.blogspot.com
Group shows 2010: Dalston Voices, Hackney Museum, After Dark, Gift 10, Vyner Street, Seed Dispersal Farm, London Fields

Matt Rowe, Screaming Skull, 2010

Super-8 projection and ceramic installation

The screaming skull pays homage to historical accounts of displaced skulls that posses supernatural powers. A screaming skull is alleged to relentlessly harass the culprit who is responsible for removing it from a designated resting place.
The projection of an animated veil onto the surface of a blank porcelain skull activates the screaming skull’s wail in infinity. For Ghost III Matt Rowe begins to investigate the morbid curiosity present in the human condition that compels us to seek talismans, relics, and spaces that offer contact to other worlds.
Rowe is an artist based in Kent and the London area. His work investigates regional myth, traditions and identity in a quest to distill an essence of folk culture.
Selected shows include: Fan Fair at Transition Gallery in London 2008, Vernacular Spectacular in the Folkestone Funicular Lift (Folkestone Triennial Fringe Events 2008) and Extra at Espace Le Carré, Lille 2010.

Nichola Bruce

'Alive , dying , dead', 2010 - 3 part moving image installation - continuous loop

I search, hunt through my archive of the past and there are always slices of film that I replay, because of a lost time, because the ghosts are so strong, and in those pieces of film, there is always an object, a place, that the memory hangs on and it is often something I still live with, only they are gone and I project their presence back onto, those places where for me they once were.
I am slowly filling my secret places of the dead and gone.
Nichola Bruce continues to film the Randometer Archive, extracts from her life.
She has been working with perception and memory through moving image exploring different forms, from experimental to feature drama to interactive mobile. She has screened her work worldwide, via broadcast, exhibition, festivals and cinema.
She also enjoys making musical noise.
http://www.nicholabruce.com/

Jo David & Kit Poulson & Alex Baker - a live sound and video sculpture, with projections on the screen in the church

The aim is to try to draw the sublime, the ineffable, the indescribable. The work comes from Jo David’s ongoing study into video feedback. Literally what happens when a camera is fed it’s own signal. What is the nature of the artefacts created? Where do they come from? What is their ontological status?

Positioning themselves as “Edwardian” Explorers, investigating the great uncharted space that might lie between the concrete world and the conceptual world.The work draws in ideas such as fractal mathematics, exploring the elemental forces that connect every human to one another and humans to the universe.

Relevant biographical info:

Jo David made the Anomolous (Fox) video piece for Ghost in 2008 which was shown in the stairwell at St John and also designed the programme that year with a drawing of St John on Bethnal Green by Rachael House. For Ghost II, in 2009, he made From Beyond, a video and sound installation, with sound by Kit Poulson. [1] The piece for Ghost III will attempt a live rendering of similar processes. Kit Poulson and Alex Baker also took part in Jo David’s curation for Supernormal at Braziers Park 2010 for Space Station Sixty-Five.

http://www.alexbaker.co.uk/

http://www.fineartresearch.org/CV/KitPoulson

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/johnmoores/25/exhibitors/kit_poulson.aspx

Ricarda Vidal, "Temporis manus edax scalae", 2010,6 min. loop,

This little film brings back the old wooden ladder of St. John which served generations of bellringers before the hand of time sealed its fate. It is an exploration of light and shadow, stillness and peace and ultimately the death of an inanimate object which contained the warmth of more than two centuries of human touch.

Ricarda Vidal is Lecturer in Visual Culture at the IGRS, School of Advanced Study (University of London). Most of the time she researches, writes or talks about culture since 1900 - above all about cars, death, urban culture, Modernism and Romanticism - but every now and then she sits down and makes things.

Gail Burton and Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly AISLE - A ten-minute performance

Films on the big screen

Michelle Hannah, "I AM THE SUN AT NIGHT" UK, 2010, 4.23min

The still point. The source of all light.
The video harnesses the precarious and fleeting aspects of our world, evoking the spiritual and visceral attachment to nature, faith and the existence of life after death, ideas very much founded in the Romantic traditions. Yet the transcendental and meditative experience at the core of this tradition is disrupted here by the disturbing presence of a singular unsexed voice.
A subconscious entity? The Future? Post Utopia? It toys with the viewer to come into its Sublime. Against the terrifying beauty, we sense our insignificant place within its infinity, a deep primal instinct to go ‘towards the light.’
It is the still point. Where no meaning exists.
Michelle Hannah is a Glasgow based artist , a recent graduate from the MFA programme at Glasgow School of Art. She currently revolves around the darker recesses of the human psyche and is at the fledgling beginnings of an esoteric cult: The Kingdom of Muin. She has recently shown at Embassy Gallery Edinburgh, The Elevator Gallery London, The Creative Labs CCA and Tramway Glasgow.

Romeo Gruenfelder 'Naissance d'un objet' Germany 5.10 min

A group of young people are discovering something right in the "center ", which remains inexplicably unseen.

Simon Hollington &Kypros Kyprianou, ‘Last Chance for a Slow Dance’

‘Last Chance for a Slow Dance’ documents seemingly polter activity in a derelict house. Continuing in the tradition of theatrical illusionists, fraudulent mediums and cinematic sideshows, the apparent lack of the performer is mirrored in the poltergeists’ literal lack of body.

Antonia Carrara, The definition of a thing in itself France 2010, 16mm on hd, 8,24 min

The cinema Louxor Temple was built in Paris in 1921 with an Egyptian-inspired architecture; briefly transformed into a night club, Louxor Megatown was abandoned in the 1990s. The film shows a guided tour to the site, retracing Louxor Temple’s plan loosely following Egyptologist Gaston Maspero’ s memories. Legendary French film director Luc Moullet explores the site, strolling through what is left of Megatown nightclub inside Louxor. The project proposes a speculative archaeological method based on a web of spatiotemporal correspondences and semantic and visual coincidences. The validity of the investigation method is constantly put to test. Especially because the whole setting is nothing but a photographic reconstruction of the site.

A.C. is an artist, living and working in Paris.

Kate Squires, "Unheimlich Gäst”Berlin, Germany 2009, Lumix stills camera. 4.29 min

Rare footage of ghosts sitting down to enjoy a normal spaghetti dinner. This film uses the common ‘ghost white sheet’ with eye holes and shows it’s unsuitability beyond the spirit world. With haunting music by Tomita.
I primarily make sculpture and collage/drawings as well as short films. My work often calls on the viewer to suspend their imagination somewhere between reality and non-reality.
Kate Squires is currently based in Berlin where she runs an art space www.centrumberlin.com with David Moynihan.

Neil Wissink, "Pugwash" Canada/UK, 2007, 16mm Film, 5:44 min

My practice explores geographical interstices and their subjective histories, the works themselves effecting poetic collisions between their materiality and their subject, between documentation and fabrication. Pugwash depicts a farm in Nova Scotia which was originally settled by my ancestors, but which I had never before visited as it was abandoned shortly after I was born. In London I showed the rushes to a professional psychic medium, whose ‘reading’ of the film became its soundtrack, offering a highly subjective and contentious proposition for what representations of place can mean.
Neil Wissink is a Canadian-born artist currently based in London. Since completing his studies at the Royal College of Art (2007) and Central St Martins (2003) he has exhibited his work in galleries and festivals internationally. Neil recently won the inaugural AMIP award for artist’s moving image, a co-commissioning scheme from the National Film and Television School and The Royal College of Art.

Sabine Schöbel, GRUNSKE Germany, 2009, Super8 and 16mm on DigiBETA, colour, sound, 4min 45sec, with the assistance of Deborah Phillips, Eva Heldmann, Justyna Hayda

The demise of the 'Palace of the Republic' in Berlin, at sunset. This is a portrait of a powerful symbol of nostalgia for the GDR that was re-used, restored and then, eventually, demolished, becoming a changing, magical emblem of the new centre of the city. The last glimpses of its 'skeleton' evoke thought-provoking experiences: the last bits of stairwells are reminiscent of other images of ruins, such as Berlin in the 1940s, when it was a bombed-out city, or of the World Trade Center in New York. It also conjures notions of the Romantic era in the 17th and 18th centuries, when ruins where expressly built. GRUNSKE is, in an odd way, the name of the sculptor responsible for this accidental monument: it's the name of a company that recycles metal. Over the course of months, their machinery carried out the contract of dismantling the Palace, for the public good in a public space. (Sabine Schöbel, 2009)

David Secombe & Andrew Martin, ‘Ghost Club’, Scout Hut Films 2007, UK, HDV, 10.53

Ghost Club follows the members of the South London Paranormal Investigation Society during a night-time vigil at a reputedly haunted local mansion, Charlton House. The team is led by club-founder John, whose pomposity is mocked by his companions Peter and Ian. No apparitions from the other side materialise during their vigil: but when John is alone, he discovers that spectres do not always conform to the criteria set by writers of Edwardian ghost stories.

David Secombe: “Ghost Club was an attempt to have some fun with the English ghost story tradition. We wanted to send up the genre whilst creating something that might be scary on its own terms.”
Andrew Martin is a journalist, novelist and broadcaster. His ninth novel, The Somme Stations, will be published by Faber and Faber in March 2011.
David Secombe is a writer, photographer and occasional film-maker. He runs the website esotericlondon.com, a literary and visual examination of the capital’s past and present.

The Phantom Organist