ICA: Off-Site - The Last 3 Years and the Future

The Institute of Contemporary Arts returns to The Old Selfridges Hotel for another year and brings with it a host of international guests for its ICA: Off-Site programme. The concrete carcass of the former residence that sits on the west wing of the luxury department store on Orchard Street sets the scene for an electric schedule of live performance across the mediums of music, art, dance and debate to coincide with Frieze week.

As well as highlights starring Isabel Lewis, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rhizome, last Thursday’s highly anticipated collaborative set between Korakrit Arunanondchai and boychild with AJGvojic commanded block-long queues for the late evening performance.

The Last 3 Years and the Future comprised of four video works accompanied by a live performance centred around a stage that had been decorated with Arunanondchai’s trademark bleached denim canvases. 

The scene in The Old Selfrdiges Hall reflected the current state of young performance art that the Bangkok-born New York-based artist is affiliated with: an unashamed aesthetic clash and sensory overload that parallels our virtual demeanour for information and speed. 

The four video works that span between 2012 and 2014 were collaborative in their construct – another emerging signature of new-age performance art – to create a complex overlapping of narrative and context shot over specific lengths of time and rooted in the artist’s heritage. 

The Future (2014) – the last in the four-part series – is an ongoing feature film shot this summer in collaboration with boychild: an intensely captivating chameleon and performance artist based in Los Angeles. Clips of popular culture television such as talent shows and news feeds are spliced together with cultural landscapes and digitally manipulated imagery over a dynamic score that set the scene for the anticipated live element of the performance. 

The theatrics of strobe lighting and smoke machines - designed by Serbian AJGvojic - created an impressive climax through the various sets to a break in its pace. Arunanondchai and his smoking, denim-clad posse handed over the stage to boychild’s exhilarating body-centric display. A remix cut of TLC’s 1999-hit Unpretty accelerated as the metamorphic artist produced gender-bending shapes and convulsions that played on notions of beauty, androgyny and anarchy shrouded in an apocalyptic haze. 

From Arunanondchai’s denim canvases to boychild’s body-as-canvas and AJGvojic's canvassing of the environment with texture and sound, The Last 3 Years and the Future was a stimulating experience to behold of 'live surface' expression and an exciting insight in the radical directions and influences being explored within contemporary performance art.

View more images and video from the performance The Last 3 Years and the Future by Korakrit Arunanondchai and boychild with AJGvojic on my Tumblr page hashtag-highlife-lowlife.tumblr.com

ICA: Off-Site runs to 18th October 2014 at The Old Selfridges Hotel, above Selfridges Food Hall – click here for a full schedule of live events. Korakrit Arunanondchai’s denim paintings may be viewed at the ICA on The Mall in the group exhibition Beware Wet Paint through to 16th November 2014.

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Top image courtesy of ICA

London Underground

I managed to check myself in to The Old Selfridges Hotel yesterday and explore the ICA’s Off-Site project A Journey Through London Subcultures: 1980s to Now. Featuring artists, architects, designers, musicians and a host of creatives from the vibrant worlds of the capital’s alternative scene, the exhibition is a high-energy display of counterculture past and present, set amongst the raw industrial backdrop that is the former hotel in Selfridges department store.

Tom Dixon, St John, Alexander McQueen, Giles Deacon, Chisenhale Gallery and Lucky PDF are a few of the influential names involved in the project, which documents both a time of incredible social importance happening in London throughout the 80s as well as the strong creative dialogue that continues to resonate to this day within the artistic community practising in the capital. 

A Journey Through London Subcultures: 1980s to Now closes this Sunday 3rd November at The Old Selfridges Hotel, above Selfridges Food Hall. For further information visit ICA.

Here are a few details from the exhibition… 

ICA Off-Site - A Journey Through London Subcultures: 1980s to Now

The Old Selfridges Hotel

1 Orchard Street

W1H 6HQ

Mellow Yellow

Detox is word-dropped at the beginning of every new year when the excesses of December quite literally consume our body and mind. Earlier in the week I took refuge in Selfridges from the delayed festive weather to explore how London's luxury mecca was coping with its very own detox. After the adrenaline-fuelled sales period, the Oxford Street landmark has taken a leaf out of its founder's notebook - Mr Harry Gordon Selfridge created a Silence Room in 1909 for shoppers to "retire from the whirl of bargains and the build up of energy". This remarkable foresight is as relevant today in an age of instantaneous 24/7 commercial information and stimulation that is unfortunately not exclusive to Christmas but right across the other 364 days of the year. 

And so to the launch of No Noise - conceived by Alannah Weston, Creative Director, the campaign is directly inspired by Mr Selfridge's quiet concept and celebrates the beauty of function through a number of in-store projects free from the harshness of promotion that we are now so accustomed to. 

From the mellow felt-lined meditation pods dotted around the store, created by Headspace, to The Quiet Shop which showcases a curated collection of minimal items as well as a run of limited edition de-branded products that Weston describes as "iconic...needing no introduction". This includes the department store's equally iconic yellow shopping bags which have been rid of their black text and emphasise the power of brand recognition and the breakdown of unnecessary design that floods everyday life.

mellow yellow at Selfridges

The Quiet Shop concept space, located in The Wonder Room on the ground floor, has staged many exciting displays over the years (White Wonders, December 2011), and its subtle staging for No Noise is just as seductive as its previous guises. Acne, Jil Sander and Caran D'Ache are a number of brands that span The Quiet Edit and join Crème de la Mer, Heinz and Marmite who have exclusively de-branded their products from logos and text to create a silent, yet symbolic, installation of colour, form and utility in the shop space.

 No Noise Marmite 250g

 No Noise Heinz Baked Beans 415g

No Noise Heinz Tomato Ketchup 342ml

 No Noise Caran D'Ache Classic 844 Mechanical Pencil

No Noise Crème de la Mer Moisturising Cream 60ml

As with all concept projects, the window space that surrounds The Quiet Shop has been transformed into a gallery. In collaboration with the Hayward Gallery four works by London-based artist Katie Paterson have been installed on street level and present her mixed media practice that includes the work 100 Billion Suns - a confetti canon which is set off everyday at 12pm. 

However for the ultimate No Noise experience The Silence Room, located in the basement, has had a twenty-first century makeover by Alex Cochrane Architects and is a wonderfully serene space, isolated from noise and retail urge and would no doubt have made Harry Gordon Selfridge quietly content. 

You can escape the noise at Selfridges London until 28th February 2012 - for more information about the No Noise campaign including in-store events click here. 

Images courtesy of Selfridges.