USA, 1984, Dirs. Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver, 69 min.

Celebrating the emergence of graffiti and hip hop of 1980s New York City, Style Wars is a look into the subway station on 49th Street as it is transformed into a meeting place for young artists. Meanwhile, the New York City government fight back, requesting that citizens ‘make their mark in society, not on society.’

The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal

USA, 2001, Dir. Matt McCormick, 16 min

As its superfluous title suggests, this short film is a pithy look at graffiti removal as a beautiful art. Narrated by Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know), the film suggests similarities to Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Russian Constructivism, giving an insight into the simplistic appeal of these unintentional masterpieces.

Get hands on with labour and human rights issues. This workshop and disucssion with activist and writier Meena Menon draws on her insights from a 33 year career working on regionals, national and local projects in India.

Meena Menon is a Senior Associate and India Coordinator for Focus on the Global South and works with SAARC, WSF and other networks dealing with peace urban development and sustainability. She co-authored One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices- the mill workers of Girangaon – an oral history (Seagull Books, 2004, in Marathi by Mauj Prakashan, 2007).

What begins as a study of the relationship between a young innocent (Elizabeth Olsen) and her malevolent captor, a cult leader (John Hawkes) who uses drugs on his victims when his charisma fails, soon transforms into something more troubling.

The life of Soma, a former graduate from a Tokyo medical school, changes abruptly after taking a job in a small mountain village as a medical assistant for the local doctor named Ito. When a widow with a severe, terminal disease explains that she wishes to keep her condition hidden from her own family, Soma begins to wonder if this is only ththe first of the many secrets that are being kept in this town.

Miwa Nishikawa has become the leading woman director in Japan since the beginning of her career. This is her latest work after the films Wild Berries (2003)  and Sway (2006) and has proven yet another outstanding development for her as a film maker. The cast features an incredible repertoire of celebrities. In the role of Ito, the popular Japanese television celebrity and actor, Tsurube Shofukutei, develops splendidly his first lead performance.

“He dominates the film as Ito dominates the village, and his superb performance brings the questions about fake expertise and real concern into very sharp focus.” – Tony Rayns, London Film Festival 2010.

Literalising the observation that film doubles its subjects as well as their celluloid manifestations, she presents in Double a program of double 16mm projections including films by Nashashibi/Skaer, Ursula Mayer, and herself. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Lisa Oppenheim and Lisa Le Feuvre, Head of Sculpture Studies at the Henry Moore Institute.

Lisa Oppenheim is a New York-based artist whose film and photography has been exhibited widely, including recently at Art Basel 42 and Performa 11. She has been screened at Tate St Ives, Tate Modern and NYC’s New Museum, and participated in group shows at Guggenheims in Bilbao, New York and Berlin, and elsewhere. Oppenheim (is represented by Galerie Juliette Jongma in Amsterdam, Harris Lieberman in New York, Klosterfede in Berlin and The Approach in London) and is a graduate of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam.

Lisa Le Feuvre is Head of Sculpture Studies at the Henry Moore Institute, a centre for the study of sculpture in Leeds. Currently the Institute is developing solo exhibitions with Michael Dean, John McCracken. Phyllida Barlow and Sarah Lucas, and a research programme on the history of exhibition sculpture. Le Feuvre was co-curator, with Tom Morton, of British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet. Between 2005 and 2009 she directed the contemporary art programme at the National Maritime Museum, with other curatorial projects staged in spaces across the UK, Le Feuvre regularly contributes to journals, publications and exhibition catalogues, including the 2010 edited publication Failure, published by Whitechapel Art Gallery/MIT Press. Between 2004 and 2010 she taught on the postgraduate Curatorial Programme in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London.

A presentation and screening by artist Neil Beloufa. Beloufa’s work uses sculpture, video, photography and performance to interrogate collective perceptions and ideas of truth and fantasy. Beloufa himself dubs his work as ‘ethnological sci-fi documentary’.

Neil Beloufa (born 1985, Paris) lives and works in Paris. Recent solo exhibitions include Kunsthaus Glarus, Zurich; The Western Front, Vancouver; Galerie BaliceHertling, Paris; and Saprophyt, Veinna (all 2011). Recent group exhibitions include Stoaways, New Museum, New York (2011); Le Retour, Musée Art Moderne d’Alger, Algiers (2011) and Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010).

Presented as once monthly evening events in our adjunct studio space and concurrent to any activities in the gallery programme, 21st Century supports emerging artists, writers, critics and theorists often giving them a first opportunity for a public platform alongside occasionally offering more established practitioners the opportunity to present developing projects in an informal environment.

The 21st Century programme for 2011/12 is supported by The Paul and Louise Cook Endowment Trust.

Over the last eight years Upset The Rhythm have inexhaustibly sought out the best underground sounds from all over the world. With fifty releases under their belt and their inspired series of Yes Way festivals they continually focus the spotlight on the UK’s own idiosyncratic DIY music. February 2012 sees the label hit the road with three incredibly inventive bands from their native soil to bring their pastoral punk, junked rhythms and tribal synth dance parties to the near and far of the United Kingdom. Upset The Rhythm’s Kingdom Tour sees Gentle Friendly, Way Through and Peepholes team up to present a revolving lineup that resonates deep within landscape, drawing on forgotten pasts and remembered futures in equal measure.

Gentle Friendly are a duo from London, comprised of David Morris and Richard Manber, who have a penchant for circular melodies, tidal fuzz and rapid junked rhythms. With an austere setup of Casio keyboard, vocals and drums (sometimes electronic) the band push against the pop boundary, trapping their songs on record like a continuous sun-warped field recording. 2009 saw Gentle Friendly release their debut album ‘Ride Slow’ to critical acclaim, with Pitchfork even citing Clipse and Lil Wayne as influences on the band. Since then Gentle Friendly have remodeled and rebuilt their sound into a stronger beast at their home studio called Deep House. Bringing us up to date, new EP ‘Rrrrrrr’ is the first fruit to fall from the tree, with its seven tracks washing the band’s insistent prism punk alongside more tender, filmic textures.

Way Through are a pastoral punk duo originally from Shropshire, now residing in London. Informed by the field as much as the flyover, Way Through write songs which phase in and out with guitar, tapes, damaged drums and vocals. Using wrong-footed repetition, rapid interplay and free-looping happenstance the band create a ragged yet intuitive tapestry of sound. Their songs walk the streets of market towns, wait forever at bus stops and lose themselves in edgelands. Way Through find great resonance with the spirit of place and try and channel its feeling into their music, joining the dots between lost places and deteriorating histories. Their debut album ‘Arrow Shower’ is out now on Upset The Rhythm, alongside the band’s new deep map project of London’s East End.

Peepholes are Katia Barrett (drums, vocals) and Nick Carlisle (keyboards). The Brighton / London duo formed in 2006 after bonding over a Chinese violin and the quietest of music. Pretty soon they turned the volume up and hit on their winning strategy of soaring, stammering synth lines, tribalised drumming and low-slung vocals. Walking a tightrope between underground punk and dance music, Peepholes write cloaked anthems as likely to open celestial gates with keys of repetition as to soundtrack a slow motion fairground accident. Their sound is otherworldly, aching with wild beats, echoing with cavernous atmospheres. Upset The Rhythm have released a split 12” and a mini-album entitled ‘Caligula’ most recently.

A major survey exhibition of video work and new work by Santiago Sierra. The exhibition includes a timetabled cycle of narrative based films shown alongside a curated selection of Sierra’s shorter and less linear works. Recently completed NO, GLOBAL TOUR is a new film which documents the manufacture and transportation through various world cities of two monumental sculptures in the form of the word “NO”.

Unchanged both in its form and immediate meaning – the sculptures gradually assume a complex semantic load during a journey full of eventualities, accidents and unexpected events.Death Counter, a Sierra piece comprised of an LED display counting annual number of human deaths worldwide since the beginning of the year will be mounted outside the gallery. Sierra represents the commercial conditions of our existence that we aren’t comfortable confronting. In doing so he has created a body of work that rescues and renews the expressive power of minimalism and conceptualism, with a political charge that encourages reflection on the classical problems of Western art while denouncing our current situation.

They release their second, much-anticipated album, Sweet Sour, in February and this exhibition marks another artistic highlight for Richardson, in a year that looks set to see the band’s meteoric rise continue.

The exhibition consists of two groups of works, corresponding to the first two albums by Band Of Skulls. The first series formed the artwork for their debut album, released in 2009, when Richardson’s paintings were photographed and then digitally manipulated to create the cover. The process was extended and developed for their forthcoming second album, for which Richardson worked with the designer Vincent Toi and the creative team at The PHI Centre in Montreal, Canada, who by turn enlisted glass artists Cédric Ginart and Karina Guevin to make a glass sculpture inspired by Richardson’s paintings. The resulting collaboration was photographed and became the cover image for the album.

Heavily influenced by painting masters including Cy Twombly and Lucien Freud, Richardson’s large-scale abstract paintings exploit the medium of oil on canvas to explore the nature of the human form, whilst making use of the visceral quality of the medium against the rough texture of the linen on which she works.

Richardson’s work is concerned with the ambiguous and the abstract, as well as the nature of symmetry and reflection.

Music is a key part of Richardson’s life, and she acknowledges a strong link between her musical and her artistic outputs, enlisting similar processes of re-working and revisiting until a finished product is reached within both disciplines. The relationship between the two mediums is a reciprocal marriage of creativity, with the music informing and inspiring her paintings, and the paintings lending the music a visual identity.

‘The Freedom of Speech Itself’ was produced by Somethin’ Else and commissioned by THE SHOWROOM and Forensic Architecture at the Department for Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths’, University of London. The project is part of ‘Communal Knowledge’ supported by The Paul Hamlyn Foundation, John Lyon’s Charity and members of THE SHOWROOM’s Supporters Scheme. It is also part of ‘Survival Kit: Art linking society, knowledge and activism’, supported by Culture 2007–2013 programme of the European Union. THE SHOWROOM is supported by Outset as Production Partner for 2012.