Launch Pad: DANCEHALL 11

Selected from CG Associate members’ submissions by Eleanor Clayton, curator at The Hepworth Wakefield, and Castlefield Gallery (CG) programme manager, Matthew Pendergast, CG is pleased to announce that its next Launch Pad project will be DANCEHALL 11.

DANCEHALL is a publication, shaped by collaboration and an interest in the exploration of sound across different disciplines, such as live music, sound installation, performance, and critical writing; published since 2010 by Psykick DANCEHALL (Hannah Ellul and Ben Knight).

The latest edition DANCEHALL 11 will be staged at Castlefield Gallery and will take the form
of performances, objects and texts. Opening on Thursday 12 November 2015 with a live
editorial introduction from Psykick Dancehall and interventions from Hello Art Magazine with Louise Hobson.  The exhibition will also feature new and recent video work by Amelia Bywater & Rebecca Wilcox, Giuseppe Mistretta and Katherine MacBride, as well as a new sound installation by Tom White. Through these diverse works that share an attentiveness to acts of listening and experiences of sound, the exhibition considers links between affective, tactile and aural modes of communication and understanding.

A programme of performances will run throughout the exhibition:

1 – 4 pm, Saturday 21 November 2015  Afternoon workshop afternoon workshop with artist Katherine MacBride to explore methods of inner, active, and attentive listening. Free to participate, places limited.  Booking essential at eventrite.

5-8pm, Saturday 21 November 2015  Evening of performances featuring Katherine MacBride, Stuart Arnot, and ‘Letters to the Editors’: responses to the exhibition from Otto Willberg and collaborators. Free, booking not required.

More on the artists

Psykick DANCEHALL is a collaboration between Hannah Ellul and Ben Knight. Since 2010 Ellul and Knight have published the journal, DANCEHALL, committed to exploring sound across disciplines. Recent projects include a performance at Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung, Hamburg (2015); contributing to Superwoofer, Matts Gallery, London (2015) and Writing Sound 2, Lydgalleriet, Bergen (2014); unsmoothmaking, exhibition and performances at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2013); and a residency at Lothringer_13 Laden, Munich (2012). psykickdancehallrecordings.com

Amelia Bywater & Rebecca Wilcox’s collaboration has come about through wanting to explore how a ‘minor voice’ might refuse or deliberately pass through normative ways of speaking. Across performance, text and video, their work aims to give precedence to processes of understanding rather than a tangible, known object of interest. Together they have recently exhibited at BALTIC 39 (Newcastle), and in 2014 they completed the Ken Cargill Writing Fellowship, Hospitalfield House, Arbroath.

Hello Art Magazine is hosted by London-based artists and writers Rosalie Schweiker and David Morris. Hello is an experiment in economical arts publishing that thrives on collaboration and a low paper-emissions policy. Each issue is ‘published’ over a six-month period and eschews traditional methods of distribution in favour of presenting columns and articles to audiences in person. For DANCEHALL 11 they are collaborating with Cardiff-based artist Louise Hobson.

Katherine MacBride is an artist and art therapist based in Rotterdam. Interested in forms of public speech and alternative ideas of what speaking together in public can be, her work has explored acoustic resonance and Pauline Oliveros’s ‘deep listening’ techniques. Recent exhibitions include the solo show Polyvocal Subjects, at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2014) and The Obliging, The Obliged, Intermedia, CCA Glasgow (2013).

Giuseppe Mistretta is a multidisciplinary artist based in Glasgow. He is drawn to what you can’t put your finger on but is all around you; that which you feel with your senses, but when you try to put it into words, becomes two-dimensional. Recent solo exhibitions include Ear Defenders, Glasgow Project Room (2015) and The Braille Room, Intermedia Gallery, Glasgow (2012). Mistretta’s writing has been published in The Happy Hypocrite, Gnommero, 2HB and DANCEHALL, among others.

Tom White is a London-based artist whose work includes sound, experimental film and video, installation and live performance. He is interested in how we respond to and inhabit environments, the effects they have on our every day existence through memory, displacement, disorientation, and how this can be articulated through immersive works. In 2014, he was awarded the British Composer Award (Sonic Art) from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, for Public Address, a multi-speaker installation of children’s voices from the Southampton Way estate which was commissioned by South London Gallery for the exhibition At The Moment Of Being Heard (2013).

CG’s Launch Pad programme previews are supported by Soup Kitchen, Manchester.