Our Band Could Be Your Life presents a night of live music at the Substation, featuring the emotive soundscapes of Bleeding Heart Narrative, the minimal hymnal of Neverest Songs and the hushed drama of Rough Comforts.
Bleeding Heart Narrative/Neverest Songs/Rough Comforts
October 15 2010
MargatePhotoFest
July 30 2010
Between 30 July and 1 August the Substation was one of four venues that hosted MargatePhotoFest.
Anat Ben-David
Connecting Nothing With Nothing
March 20 2010
What does MTV have in common with political performance art? What does 1920s German stage composer Kurt Weill have in common with feminist electro-pop group Chicks on Speed? And, what links Margate to the anti-globalisation lobby, the oil industry and the French resistance movement?
The answer: Artist Anat Ben-David.
Now Limbo has commissioned Anat to produce an exhibition and performance especially for Margate. The new work will reimagine the song Die Muschel von Margate Kurt Weill, taking further inspiration from T S Eliot’s poem The Wasteland, which was partly written in Margate and famously contains the lines, 'On Margate sands. I can connect Nothing with nothing'.
The original Die Muschel von Margate (which has been translated into English as Mussels from Margate – though a more accurate translation would read The Shell of Margate,) was written for Ukrainian playwright Leo Lania’s satirical play “Konjuktur”, and tells the story of how, on the promenade at an English seaside resort, an oil refinery eventually replaces a little souvenir kiosk selling painted shells. The seller’s yell – “Shell! Shell! Shell!” soon becomes an angry rant against the Shell Oil Company.
For the new piece, Anat Ben-David will be using parts of both texts and adding new material to create a visual performance work that will combine music (the artist is a member of musical collective Chicks on Speed, touring with them and Peaches in 2002 and releasing her solo album Virtual Leisure on Chicks on Speeds’ record label in 2008), video and print to create an installation, through which she intends to recreate the fictionalised Margate of Weill and Eliot’s writing; a place where the romantic ideals of the past collide with the industrial capitalism of the modern world.
Video Works by Harold Offeh
Short Films
March 14 2010
A selection of short film works by artist Harold Offeh.
SichtLautTrio
David Leahy and Geraldo Si
March 13 2010
SichtLautTrio is a playful interaction between a musician, a dancer and a double bass. Through improvisation in music, movement and space, the performers allow the energy of each instant to fuel performances full of life, spontaneity and humour.
Harold Offeh
Margate's First Beaux Arts Ball
March 13 2010
Thanks to Harold Offeh, Margate will be holding its First Beaux Arts Ball – an event where participants will be given the chance to dress-up as their favourite buildings from the town, before parading along the Seafront and taking part in an exhibition at the Substation.
Margate is famous for its skyline, but visitors to the town wanting to get the best view have a number of locations competing for their attention.
Perhaps they should watch the sunset from the Warpole Bay Hotel. Maybe a view of Margate should take in Dreamland? Should they wait until the Turner Contemporary building, with its panoramic views of the sea, is completed in 2011 - or should they request a ride to the top of the controversial Arlington House tower block?
On Saturday 13 February visitors will have a chance to escape this dilemma as Margate’s favourite buildings parade down the seafront.
The event is based on the 1931 New York Beaux Arts Ball, a high-society event where a group of architects (including William Van Alen, architect of the Chrysler Building,) dressed up as the buildings they designed. Offeh describes the original event as a combination of ‘a highbrow architecture prize and a Butlins fancy dress contest’. He says, “I’m very interested in how people might respond to local architecture, and which buildings they think are worth celebrating. Perhaps Pete’s Fish Factory is more important to some than the Sea Bathing Hospital – who knows?”
“I’m offering a free workshop where people can make the hats and costumes before joining the parade. At the end of the parade the outfits will be exhibited in the Substation and we’ll have a party with a performance by SichtLautTrio.”
Ghanaian-born, Offeh’s previous work in photography, performance and video has largely used role-play as a way of addressing the representation and understanding of identity through the media of popular culture. This has seen him adopt a number of memorable personas, including Mammy – based on actor Hattie McDaniel, the Oscar winner who was typecast following her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind.
On March 14 Limbo will be screening a selection of Harold Offeh's short films.
Making Landmarks free one and a half hour workshops. 11.00am and 1:00pm everyone welcome. Make your favourite Margate building, turn it into a costume and join the parade at 3.30pm along Margate seafront.
Daniel Lehan
Shine The Light
March 06 2010
Join Daniel Lehan, the Human Lighthouse, on a tour around Margate’s dark and mysterious places and ask him to shine the light for you.
Daniel Lehan, as Human Lighthouse, will illuminate the dark and dead places of Margate, with his performance Shine The Light, a work that commemorates the presence of notable writers and artists in Margate, and casts light upon future creativity in his own hometown.
Looking to the future, Lehan will illuminate the way forward, casting a beam of light upon the uncertain, and possibly treacherous path of future creativity in this seaside town.
This Happy Band
Lighting The Wayward Ways
March 06 2010
In the tradition of troubadours, and travelling minstrels, This Happy Band will parade around Margate, commemorating its past, and the themes of Winter Dormancy, and Glorious Resurrection with their eccentric and eclectic performances. Lord Lehan will continue into the night when he transforms himself into a human lighthouse.
Charlie Fox (aka Urban Bear)
Since 1999, Charlie Fox has worked as the Artistic Director of counterproductions. Promoting socially engaged and experimental artistic practices, counterproductions produce and collaborate on education, community and transdisciplinary art projects in the UK and internationally. Fox has just submitted his practice-as-research PhD thesis 'In the Event of Laughter' and is working on a new commission from Rational Rec.
Daren Callow
A singer, songwriter and guitarist with a growing reputation for performances that combine strong rhythmical elements and clever use of technology, with thought-provoking lyrics ranging from the deeply emotional to the humorous.
Calum F. Kerr
Kerr's Instrumento-Being, a walking percussive instrument, has performed with This Happy Band in its various incarnations and has also appeared at the ICA's 'Calling Out of Context' festival. as an artist, Kerr's work encompasses performance, audio installation and frequent interactive enquiry. He exhibits extensively in the UK and internationally, and is also the lead vocalist for the undead psycho-country musical group, the Lonesome Cowboys from Hell.
Tim Flitcroft
After studying music, Flitcroft wrote music for both film and TV. Later after studying film at Central St. Martins, his work broadened to include installation and other media. He lives and works in London and is part of the artist collective Area10 based in Peckham.
Daniel Lehan
Lehan has worked on a wide range of visual arts projects, including collaborations with writers, dancers and musicians, and works with galleries and museums to deliver creative projects to children, young adults, the elderly and those in prison.Daniel's works often begin with simple instructions that any man or woman in the street can follow: 'Make a sign saying what you want', 'Write down your darkest thoughts', 'collect unusual stories from the newspaper', 'Draw a pie chart of your emotional life'. He uses understated calm and reassuring charm to encourage people to interact and create these works with him. The end product is a rich patchwork of thoughts and ideas gathered up from the minutiae of people’s lives.
Frog Morris
An artist, poet, performer and curator. Morris' eccentric brand of performance art has appeared in museums, galleries and art festivals across Europe. Frog Morris can also be seen hosting his own regular variety show at the Montague Arms in New Cross, London.
Pierrette Socobaz
The name of a multi-faceted artist with musical comperial and facilitorial skills developed over twenty-five years of performance, including; T.I.E theatre, site specific, comedic, forum, corporate and playback.
Mr Solo
As the singer from the mid-90s cult heroes 'David Devant And His Spirit Wife', Solo is no stranger to the limelight. Now, as his adequate moniker suggests, Solo has gone solo. Not to be outdone by his previous outlandish antics, his music is equally and unrelentingly brilliant, and as undeniably indivual as it ever was. The lead single taken from his forthcoming album, 'It Makes You Wonder' is the perfect anthem for the rained upon, the ideal ode to the visionary as we plummet into the unknown mythical abyss of the financial meltdown.
His Majesty Rex Nemo
His Royal Highnes Rex Nemo will defy the prognostications of the many rogues and cheats presently plaguing his realm, and will enjoy his own again, in his loyal town of Margate and elsewhere, when all will be well.
less.
A minimalist art rock band fronted by artists Paul Good and Kirsty Wood.
Open Submission
Students' Short Films
March 06 2010
Welcome Speech - Andreas Pashias
Chip Shop - Elizabeth Rose
Traces - Elizabeth Rose
Monolith Pater - Laura Phillips
Dancing Couple - Harry Davidson
Field - Harry Davidson
Peep Show - Patricia Vidal Delgado
Cycle - James Kelly
One small leap by an Artist, one giant leap makes it Art - Charlotte Jackman
World War 2 - Hannah Kimani & Serra Tansel
The Haunted Castle - Inez De Coo
My Dreams are Made of You - Gavriella Kalafati
An Extraordinary Predicament of Matter - Rebecca Hope
Theremin - Dewi Cary
In Glasses - Andreas Pashias
Nolde's Sky - Sharon Liu
Points of Contact - James Kelly
Trimester - Kye Wilson & Helena Eflerová
Patron Saint of Womanhood - Keita Lynch
Sakura and Sex - Hannah Kimani & Serra Tansel
The Suggestion - Inez De Coo
To Dry - Claudio Rivetti
Bedwyr Williams
The Return of the Dinghy King
February 27 2010
"After a childishly long sabbatical the Dinghy King returns with tales of his touristic cargo cult. The Bucket and Spade Shamen from Costa Geriatrica tells of drifter dentists and drop-out opticians and the freckled bums of the Manchester navy. Colwyn Bay – Margate. Same shit different smell or is it same smell different shit?" asks Mr Williams from North Wales.
This is the Dinghy Kings first outing to Margate where, instead of luring holiday-makers like he did when he last appeared in Colwyn Bay, he will become a day-tripper and for one day only you can day trip on his shamanistic rantings and ravings and, if you are lucky, he may even transport you momentarily to Colwyn Bay where he grew up with size 13 feet.
The character of 'The Dinghy King' is based on the phenomenon of the Cargo Cult, which developed primarily in remote parts of the Pacific region when tribal societies began to encounter technologically advanced cultures, resulting in effigies of planes and runways being built in an attempt to lure ancestral spirits, which they believed would bring wealth in the form of cargo. Dinghy King is therefore about waiting.Margate is also waiting; its residents not looking skywards but looking towards Turner.
Bedwyr Williams was born in St Asaph, North Wales in 1974. He graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Central St Martins School of Art in 1997 followed by an MA from Ateliers, Arnhem. Williams returned to North Wales in 1997 and currently lives and works in Caernarfon. He is represented by STORE, London and in 2005, he represented Wales in the Venice Biennale with a project called ‘Basta’ Williams’ work involves stand-up comedy, sculpture and painting, posters and photography.
Anthony Schrag
Wrasslin'
February 20 2010
Are you frustrated? Depressed that the Christmas season has passed? Is the economic downturn bringing you down with it?
If so, and you need to direct your feelings of disappointment and negativity somewhere constructive, Anthony Schrag has the answer. For one day only he will be your human punch-bag, because he wants to see you ‘smile and sweat’. Schrag is fed-up with culture that plays it safe and offers cerebral solutions. He is far more interested in making a direct physical connection with his audience, even if it means he ends up pinned to a wrestling mat.
The Zimbabwean- born artist, currently based in Glasgow, has made a career producing work that explores the body as a tool of communication and celebrates physical challenge. On his website you will find videos of previous works and will get a flavour of his very own flip attitude towards the intellectualisation of his practice. Perhaps the most extreme manifestation of Schrag’s work is his wrestling series, in which the artist invites all-comers to take him on in a single round of wrestling.
Schrag says, “I’m no professional, and there is certainly a sense of danger in letting strangers do what they will with my skinny little body, but that is what makes the project interesting: The trust and sense of reality between two people that only know each other as opponents. If I show contenders that I trust them, it is usually reciprocated – and there’s a referee on hand in case things get too rough!”
Schrag is glad to be bringing the wrestling series to Margate, where his fights will take place in a striped tent, which the artist is constructing in homage to Mr Punch. “For me, Punch is the symbol of joyful disorder: The moment when we lose our heads and reject the drab order and bureaucracy of the everyday. This is what I want the wrestling series to capture – a shared experience of when our minds become secondary to physical needs."
“Violence occupies an important place within history and mythology, but all too often (and especially in this current political climate) it is relegated to being undesirable, unwelcome, and base. We sometimes forget about its cathartic ability; as a great unifier; as a mirror to the common and raw beast inside us all.”
Artist's Short Films
February 20 2010
Specially selected from the LUX collection
Disclaimer - Michael Curran 1993
YYAA - Wojciech Bruszewski 1973
Taxonomy (Death Stories) - Franko B 2002
Waiting For Waste - Anne Course (animation) 2000
To Be Born Through Our Own Hands - Jane Prophet 1987
Shouting Match - George Barber 2004
Prince - Ann Course (animation) 1999
I.L.Y.L.A.M.L.T.V - James Unsworth
Andrew Kötting
That's The Way To Do It
February 13 2010
12 Shooters is an experimental showreel of short films, each directed by a different artist-filmmaker, and each derived from a different work from the past 12 years of Farquhar’s practice.
Marcia Farquhar
To The Shelter
February 13 2010
On the late-winter afternoon of 13th February, Marcia Farquhar will be leading a short guided procession to the seaside shelter where TS Eliot sat in 1921 looking onto Margate sands. ‘I can connect/ nothing with nothing’, he wrote. Taking this as its rallying cry, Farquhar’s expedition will seek the heart of nothingness and nonsense in Margate’s bleak wintry front.
Exploring the physical, historical and social terrain between Dreamland and Wasteland, the tour is one of a series of works in which Farquhar, the consummate visitor, assumes the role of guide and host, often leading bemused locals through landscapes with which they’d previously thought themselves familiar. Here, on the eve of St Valentine’s, Farquhar will be remembering Madame Sosostris, a famous clairvoyant, with a spell of amateur fortune-telling. Belladonnas and drowned sailors may dance to the sound of a pleasantly whining mandolin.
Cups of tea will be served in the Substation before and after the tour, with roasted chestnuts on the beach inbetween. Andrew Kötting’s short film ‘That’s the Way to Do It’, based on Farquhar’s life-size Punch & Judy performance The Cabinet of Horribly Violent Glove Puppets, will also be playing in the Substation. Farquhar herself spent the early years of her life just across the Estuary in the seaside town of Felixstowe, over which sweep the same Russian winter winds. On this occasion, the art gallery will offer some shelter, and the shelter will offer none.
Marcia Farquhar is an artist working in performance, photography, video and object-making. Her site-specific works have been staged and exhibited internationally in museums and galleries, including lecture theatres, kitchen showrooms, pubs, parks and leisure centres.
Farquhar’s performances are conceptual in nature and often precariously balanced between the prescribed and the unpredictable – socially open, broadly embracing of circumstance, and resolutely focussed in the live and unrepeatable moment. They have also made frequent and subversive use of popular cultural forms such as TV cookery, pop-psychology, the Punch & Judy show, the fashion catwalk and the guided tour.
Farquhar was born in London and received her MA in 1998 from Stuart Brisley’s department at the Slade School of Fine Art. She lives and works in London and Berlin. Recent work includes the book Marcia Farquhar’s '12 Shooters', a 192 page document of her collaboration with 14 artist-filmmakers, published in the Summer of 2009.