- Venue
- All around
- Location
- South East England
On my train journey to Whitstable I was sat amongst a group of elderly ramblers, chatting excitedly about the coastal walk they about to embark on and swapping tales of past walking feats. Soon a raucous crowd of young boys in full tracksuit joined us with their identical spiky haircuts and bleach blonde highlights. They cheered loudly when the tannoy announced that the train would terminate at Margate.
Unlike Margate, as I was soon to discover, Whitstable is not the typical tacky type of British seaside town (although touristy in a different sense) and that made it a fascinating setting for the biennale. Built up from a fishing and seafood industry it is a gentle town where many Londoners now have quiet summer homes and do sailing. There is definitely not the over-hype that is prevalent in large events like the giant of Biennales: Venice and the fringe festivals in Brighton and Edinburgh. It’s laid-backness allowed individual artworks/ events to breathe more and give out it’s own life and presence.
There was a large amount of things to see and do. It didn’t take me long when I arrived before I spotted my first signs of art, which I later learnt was Incogknito Graffiti’s knitting wrapped around an anchor statue and a lamppost. Knitting sprung up everywhere, wrapped around pebbles on the beach, bollards and doors handles. It was highly amusing and I almost walked off with one of the pebbles only to think better of it.
I felt the maps and programme could have been a lot simpler, as it took me a good while to work out where to start and to decipher locations from the Main Programme and from the Satellite projects programme, which were in different booklets. I think it would have been easier if both programmes were merged into one.
An artwork that stood out for me was Celeste, a boat that apparently had a sail covered in sixty thousand mirror tiles, with artists Zoë Walker and Neil Bromwich on it broadcasting a live radio station out in the middle of the bay. Sat on the stoney beach looking out to the water, on a warm breezy day, listening with headphones to dreamy abstracts of radio play and music, catching glimpses of the boat from afar conjured up feelings of magic and enchantment found in the essence of Bas Jan Ader’s fatal boat journey in search of the miraculous, and the romantic anarchism of pirate radio.
Another piece that seemed to transcend different spaces was Siân Robinson’s Scale the Mountain to View the Plain, that took place in an old coastguard’s hut. A performance where she presented images like a lecture in mime and corresponded to each with a small action. The only thing that wasn’t so clear to me was if the images were connected to the hut, Whitstable or to Robinson’s personal history. Another performance that left me slightly perplexed was, Telling Cards a fortune-telling piece where her tarots cards were made out of photographic collages of individual people’s stories. I chose my three cards and surprisingly they did echo a conversation that I had just before I had sat down at her table. Someone had been telling me about chaotic bus journeys in Bethnal Green and how it was great to get away. And on the cards was a montage of a busy peak moment London scene and in another scene; yoga, oysters, sunshine and beach were present. I wasn’t sure though if my story of how I related to these cards were going to be fed into the narrative of her fortune telling or if that was just the point of the exercise.
That’s Entertainment presented by Transition gallery was a thoughtful exhibition that contemplated its surrounding but with their own personal edge. It was set in someone’s studio and as I walked in, I noticed immediately that the window, which framed the sea and sails outside seemed to be a part of the work on display. The exhibition captured the quirky essence and Britishness of England’s seaside resorts with silent alluring paintings, a driftwood sculpture, and the hugest and most grotesque Punch I’ve seen yet.
I felt a lot of work was quite considerate to its environment and attempted to engage the local people and open up spaces into which one might not normally venture. Knitting seems to be a trend at the moment but it is possible to see the great social interactive potential that it has and more knitting was to be found by artists Jenny Duff and Nicola Tree, urging people to help knit a giant tea cosy for a beach hut ambitiously over a period of two days. Young, old, male and female joined in the knitting frenzy. I placed a secret in Serena Korda’s Library of Secrets, another piece that engaged the locals by making a display of what the people of Whitstable keep between their pages.
The curatorial approach roundly covered all the topical subjects, from ecological issues to cultural diversity. Oreet Ashery posed as a made up saint who seems to have a predilection for the colour green and putting a fish in his mouth. Cool kids of the eastern diaspora – artists Harminder Singh Judge and Magdalena Suranyi – join him in a series of ritualistic performances.
When an artist of an ethnic origin intentionally makes work in relation to the stereotypes these type of artists can get generated for them, there can’t help but be a certain amount of controversy. Do they fall foul of these roles that they avoid to take or do they manage to subvert them? The question is also raised as to whether these artists have been chosen because they fulfil desires to represent diversity, and if that is positive or negative. Ashery seems to use this creation of a new saint to release himself from the restrictions of set definitions, to give space to explore issues that are more loaded and sensitive. Interestingly this reminded me of Alex Michon’s paintings of the made up life of rockabilly Billy Lee Roscoe inThat’s Entertainment, also had the sense of freeing oneself and creating a new space to play in.
I barely skimmed the surface of all the events and projects going on and will be there again this Saturday for my own involvement in Brighton Pebble Museum’s “let’s make our own museum!” project. It’s definitely worth a day trip or two, plenty to ponder, see and do and if the art gets too much there is always the beach and the sea. I went home thoroughly satisfied, with the taste of the oysters in my mouth.
