‘Tokens’, John Aldus

HS Projects commissioned ‘Tokens’, 2006, a permanent public art commission on Marchmont Street, Bloomsbury by artist John Aldus. ‘Tokens’ evokes poignant memories of London’s great Foundling Hospital as well as the continuing worldwide themes of childhood abandonment, trafficking and exploitation.

We developed the project and artist brief, selection process including curating a public exhibition of the shortlsted artists’ concept proposals, established a stakeholder representative art committee and managed the commission from beginning to end.

Marchmont Street is built on land that was formerly part of the Foundling Estate, where stood the Foundling Hospital. This institution, Britain’s first home for abandoned children, was founded in 1739 by Captain Thomas Coram (1668-1751), a retired sea captain who, returning from North America was appalled to find so many poor and socially excluded children in eighteenth century London ‘left to die on dung hills’. His concern and determination led him to gather an influential set of governors, including William Hogarth and George Frideric Handel, and to obtain the royal patronage of King George II.

John Aldus took his inspiration from the poignant collection of tokens held by the Foundling Museum nearby. The tokens, left by mothers to identify their babies in case they came back to reclaim them once admitted into the Foundling Hospital, have since become poignant symbols of their hopes and dreams. Admission to the hospital was determined by a lottery-style draw of coloured balls from a sack. Drawing a white ball meant acceptance and a future for mother and baby, whereas drawing a black ball meant rejection; hence the expression ‘Black Balled’. The tokens included coins, scraps of ribbon and buttons.

Aldus worked closely with the Foundling Museum in translating his inspiration derived from these objects to create ‘Tokens’. Embedded into the very fabric of Marchmont Street, a trail of cast metal shapes, including the three different coloured balls, lie seemingly scattered on the pavement of Marchmont Street inviting the passersby to deeply engage with the tragedy of the time which still has resonances today. John Aldus’ ‘Tokens’ also marked the completion of ‘Marchmont Parade’, a new public space, which incorporates landscaping and public art.
‘Walking along a street, crossing a square is not a totally innocent act. Adventure, an encounter, the unexpected, a desire, an idea…… affect the senses of the walker, giving him as many approaches to the site that his mind is open to, that his curiosity allows’ – John Aldus.

‘The purpose of this work is to add to this process a dimension of time, inviting the viewer to ‘inscribe’ himself in the area’s history. Placing our steps in those of our predecessors, we find our place in this continuum becoming altogether witness of the past, actor of the present and a constitutive element of the ‘pasts to come’, of what our successors will be the observers and, in their turn, the actors. We are sharing a site across the time. In this perspective the viewer becomes the most important part of the art project: its subject’ – John Aldus.

‘Marchmont Parade’ was created by a unique public/private/community partnership, comprising the Marchmont Association, Allied London Properties, Hermes, Brunswick TRA and Camden Council. HS Projects commissioned ‘Tokens’ on behalf of the partnership.
‘Tokens’ is located on Marchmont Street, Bloomsbury, London.

 

 

‘What separates us’

HS Projects curated ‘What separates us’, a group exhibition by four Brazilian artists, Tonico Lemos Auad, Adriano Costa, Rodrigo Matheus and Matheus Rocha Pitta, funded by Arts Council England, at Sala Brasil, the Embassy of Brazil, London.

‘What separates us’ examines ideas of value systems and exchange mechanisms from cultural, social and economic perspectives. The exhibition explores ideas of international trade, travel and mobility, whilst examining the ‘real value’ of art and the system in which it is made and validated.

‘What separates us’ is located in the Sala Brasil, the former ticket hall for the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company, the Titanic ship operator, now home to the Embassy of Brazil in London. The works enter into a dialogue with the Sala Brasil’s historic ties with shipping and international trade, as well as how new emerging markets and decreasing trade restrictions have been instrumental to exchanges within the complex circuits of trade. The exhibition questions value systems, relationships with commodities, products and exchange mechanisms echoing transatlantic enterprises dating from the sixteenth century to current international interest in Brazil as a commercial partner. As part of this debate the exhibition examines the notion of art as a commodity, capable of being marketable, sellable and collectible.

Tonico Lemos Auad presents a sound installation, ‘Desafinado/Out of Tune’, 2003/2008, played on a three minutes and forty second loop which is being shown in the UK for the first time. Auad recorded a well-known blind Brazilian singer whistling the recognisable Brazilian ballad Desafinado by Joao Gilberto continuously for several hours. Auad observes the performer’s inhaling becoming demonstrably more demanding, selecting a point where the tune begins to break down. The resulting sound is melodious and melancholic and immediately familiar to any Brazilian, but the pauses charge the empty spaces with a distinct longing. The artist was interested in mapping this emptiness through this work, although now the work has also become a reflective commentary on the current socio- economic situation in Brazil.

Adriano Costa is re-configuring ‘New Contemporaries / Novos Contemporâneos’, 2015, an installation first shown at the Modern Institute in Glasgow, in which he makes a humorous play on the commodification and distortion of indigenous cultural meaning. Ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic decoction of ritual and sacred value to various native people in the Amazon, has become popularised as a pseudo-spiritual, recreational drug. Costa’s installation of white cotton t-shirts, for sale at £10 each, in a variety of fonts and paginations, displayed on clothing rails, echoes popular cultural merchandising and its commercial distribution, with the proceeds donated to the Guarani and Kaiowá indigenous peoples in Brazil. The work questions the boundaries between art and non-art and the distinction between the throwaway and the precious.

Costa is also showing a sculpture titled after the sixth king of the First Babylonian Dynasty, Hammurabi, known for creating one of the earliest surviving codes of law in recorded history. Centering on the dialectics of modernity and tradition, ‘Hammurabi’ is a marble work engraved with a joke, which is activated once the viewer stands over the piece and reads the inscription. Costa’s avoidance of the pedestal and the frame highlights the vernacular aspect of the objects he uses and emphasises their deviation from art-historical tradition.

Two new site-specific works, specially commissioned for the exhibition, ‘A Tale in a Thousand’, 2016 and ‘Workers’, 2016, are being shown by Rodrigo Matheus, made up of everyday objects seamlessly integrated into the track lighting system, tracing a thin border between fiction and functionality. The carefully selected and arranged objects create a multi-directional dialogue with the narrative of the ceiling’s paintings that crosses history, architecture, art and design. In the displacement and re-organisation of the hanging objects, Matheus considers their inherent qualities and the social and economic circuits they are attached to.

Matheus Rocha Pitta is showing his ‘Brazil Series’, 2013 for the first time in the UK, a sequence of eight photographs of red earth scattered with raw meat, taken in Brazil under the midday sun in 2013. The series is based on the story of 76 tons of boxed meat that was found unfit for human consumption and disposed of by the authorities in a ground fill site in Rio, and which was subsequently dug up and eaten by the local residents. The colour of the soil in Brasìlia, Brazil’s modernist planned capital, is famous for its redness and these photographs are an attempt to connect earth and flesh through colour, as well as trying to retrieve the archaic meaning of the word Brazil, which originally means ‘place for embers’.

Rocha Pitta is also showing a new work, specially commissioned for the exhibition, that relates to his ‘Brazil Series’. ‘Stela 18(carne viva)’, 2016, created by pouring concrete onto found objects and newspaper cuttings laid into a shuttered mould, this hybrid of cast and collage is based on the common and inexpensive method of manufacturing grave markers for the poor. In order to prevent the poured concrete from sticking to the wooden mould, the mould is lined with newspaper to enable the slab to be easily turned out. The underside of each concrete gravestone is lined with newspaper and the joke is to give the dead something to read. Rocha Pitta inverts this joke literally and metaphorically by turning the slab over to reveal the work.

A limited edition illustrated catalogue accompanied the exhibition with texts by Michael Asbury, Matthieu Lelievre and Kiki Mazzucchelli.

An In-Conversation with Rodrigo Matheus, Tonico Lemos Auad and Kiki Mazzucchelli, moderated by Oliver Basciano, Editor ‘International’ of Art Review, examined the value of cultural projects such as ‘What separates us’, in providing distinct cultural experiences and Brazil’s position within an increasingly globalised art world.

‘What separates us’ was at Sala Brasil, the Embassy of Brazil in London, from 20 May – 2 July 2016. It was funded by Arts Council England, Christie’s Education and the Embassy of Brazil, London.

 

‘Regeneration!’, Jessie Brennan

HS Projects commissioned ‘Regeneration!’, a community outreach project by Jessie Brennan with people who lived, worked and played on the Robin Hood Gardens estate in Poplar, East London, before it was demolished. ‘Regeneration!’ included an exhibition of drawings, conversations and photographs and a limited edition artist publication.

Jessie Brennan worked with residents and caretakers to record their personal memories and feelings about Robin Hood Gardens, a ‘brutalist’ social housing estate designed by architects Alison and Peter Smithson in the late 1960s and due for demolition in 2016. Together they produced a body of drawings, conversations and photographs that explore the qualities of a lived-in brutalism, the impact of redevelopment and the politics of regeneration.

The conversations, inside homes and workspaces, illuminate the personal qualities of responses shared by individuals. They reveal private memories – the glowing light from windows across the face of the block, the flight of a red star returning to nest, the shape of a tree good for reading under – and intimate feelings towards the estate, gently animating the blocks, giving human presence to grey concrete.

The drawings entitled ‘Conversation Pieces’, were made on site by rubbing graphite across the surface of a sheet of paper, revealing the pattern and everyday wear and tear of a doormat beneath. They visualise a literal and metaphorical threshold between semi-public and private spaces; from the street deck to a home’s interior. The photographs, all made at dusk, during the fleeting interval between daylight and darkness, are a symbolic gesture towards the estate’s imminent demolition. They capture the human interactions with the blocks, presenting a kind of poetic drama of the estate through intensely coloured and thoughtfully framed compositions. The responses reflect on different experiences of the community, past and present, and the rapid demographic and social changes taking place across the East End, brought on by regeneration.

A special publication with texts by Owen Hatherley and Richard Martin, as well as drawings, conversations, archive material and photographs, continues the project’s discussion on lived-in brutalism, the impact of redevelopment and the politics of regeneration. ‘Regeneration!’ brings together plans and images from several archives, two essays, two series of drawings, personal experiences of long- and short-term tenants and a caretaker in the form of interviews, and a series of photographs by former tenant Abdul Kalam. The text by Owen Hatherley charts the political decisions that led to the rise and fall of Robin Hood Gardens and their wider implications for social democracy. Richard Martin’s essay contextualises the project through an analysis of Jessie’s artwork ‘A Fall of Ordinariness and Light’ and proposes a broader set of questions around the politics of regeneration.

‘Regeneration!’ was funded by the Insight Community Arts Programme (2002 – 2015).

The project ran from January to June 2015.