Aldgate Series 1:
Nabil Ahmed, Eileen Simpson and Ben White
Thursday 24 November 2011, 6:30pm, Forum, ASD
A series of lectures with presentations made by those who can offer an insight into the area of Aldgate and its urban and creative context, as well as the ongoing regeneration of the area.
Nabil Ahmed: Does the bus stop here?
The mosque in contemporary Europe is a contested space. Their architecture is at the same time informal, hidden, public, and most of all political in so far as they act as barometers to the atmospheres of democracy in European cities, between the folds of social inclusion and plurality, migrant struggles and rising Islamophobia. Most recently conceived as a multi-channel sound installation in collaboration with Openvizor as a parallel event to the 12th Istanbul Biennale, Does the Bus Stop Here? is an ongoing project by the artists Nabil Ahmed and Füsun Türetken which produces counter geographies of the contemporary European mosque using sound recordings made inside prayer spaces at various locations in Paris, London and Istanbul.
Nabil Ahmed is a contemporary visual artist, writer and musician. His work and various collaborative projects have been presented internationally including at The Centre for Possible Studies Serpentine Gallery, Resonance FM, The Showroom, Tate Modern, Nottingham Contemporary, no.w.here, South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC) in Toronto and the Royal Geographic Society. He is co-founder of Call & Response, a sound art collective and curatorial project based in London. He lives and works in London.
Eileen Simpson and Ben White, Open Music Archive – The Brilliant and the Dark
Eileen Simpson and Ben White work at the intersection of art, music and information networks. They seek to challenge conventional mechanisms for the authorship, ownership and distribution of culture – particularly through working with archive material. Their ongoing project Open Music Archive is an initiative to source, digitise and distribute out-of-copyright sound recordings and is a vehicle for collaborative projects exploring the material’s potential for reuse.
www.openmusicarchive.org/projects
Recent projects include Song Division at Camden Arts Centre (2011); The Brilliant and the Dark at The Women’s Library, London (2010); Struggle in Jerash at Gasworks, London and Makan, Amman (2010); Parallel Anthology at Biennale of Sydney and Whitechapel Gallery (2010); and Free-to-air at ICA London (2008) and Cornerhouse, Manchester (2007).
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Lectures co-curated by ASD Projects Office and Publica
