The Wapping Project – Transition, Transformation and Transience

Transition, Transformation, Transience

Published to coincide with the launch of The Wapping Project Commissions London, September 2016

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Introduction 4 Sophie Mayer Line of Visible Light 6 Alice Butler The Peach Slip 16 Lavinia Greenlaw A poet’s difficulty with words 24 Andrea Luka Zimmerman A Feature Documentary 30 Voices from Berlin 40 Contributors 44

Transition, Transformation, Transience

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For many, we are the building that was home to our work and ideas for 20 years. Yet, we have always been an idea in transition. We put Wapping on international art, architectural and culinary maps. We claimed the whole area of London for ourselves, becoming synonymous with Wapping. Over many years there, we answered the phone with the brief “Hello, Wapping”… Somehow, without us noticing, the unorthodox project of Jules Wright became an institution.

We thrived among the ancient bricks of the building, underneath the water tanks and the gantry crane, on bare concrete floors. Together with the stainless steel, slate and the fresh concrete we brought in, this was our canvas. A container for crystallising thoughts. A space for dreaming. The building had its own memories embedded in its ragged surfaces.

We respected those leaving them visible. We gradually added our own marks and left those behind.

Now, we are more in transition than ever. Ungrounded from the building, we are transforming ourselves yet again.

We were also touched closely by transience with Jules’ passing in 2015.

The new Wapping Project is even more about people we work with — artists, friends, partners, supporters and admirers. We exist to enable artists to work with unrestrained ambition. Taking risks and making new work possible has always been at our core.

We would like to invite you to join us on this journey and hope you enjoy the first projects developed by The Wapping Project Commissions. Voices from our first residents at The Wapping Project Berlin — Dana Sederowsky, Zara Matthews and Maija Mustonen; new writing by Sophie Mayer, Alice Butler and Lavinia Greenlaw about Transition, Transformation, Transience; and a feature length documentary by Andrea Luka Zimmerman, an intimate portrait and expansive exploration of human conscience, war and the limits of deniability.

Marta Michalowska & Thomas Zanon-Larcher Directors, The Wapping Project

Sophie Mayer Line of Visible Light

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Prophet Conductor /Transition / ‘[Edmund] Burke notes that while darkness is sublime, “a quick transition from darkness to light” produces an effect on the mind that is even more powerful.’

From Jane Prophet’s Conductor webpage ‘An electroluminescent wire is a thin copper wire coated in phosphor which glows when an alternating current is applied to it… EL wire is not a series of points but produces a 360º unbroken line of visible light.’

From Wikipedia Electroluminescence is one way of shining. Light can be produced as a result of chemical reactions in bio-organisms, as a result of the mechanical action on a solid, as a result of the absorption of photons, as a result of ionizing radiation, and by the re-emission of absorbed energy when a substance is heated.

Light is work. Light is power. Light is currency. Light is movement. Light is movement from one point to another. Light is movement to the eye, in the eye. Light happens at the spark gap: is a leap, a leak, a lack, a lick at the air, a lift, a gift.

In Spanish, darle luz means ‘to give birth to’, to give to the light. In Conductor, 120 electroluminescent cables dropped 24 ft into 74 tonnes of water: a kind of birthing pool contiguous with the womb, holding the viewer in a stilled moment of transition, of always being born.

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Four miles by road or seven miles by river from the Thames Barrier, The Wapping Project was close to the flood. As sea levels rise and the river is inundated, dinoflagellate (sea sparkle) plankton may appear floating through what remains of the city.

As he sets up the frame for his sea-faring tale, Joseph Conrad’s Marlow tells his listeners, as dusk falls, that London is ‘like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker’ (Heart of Darkness).

Downriver from Wapping, in sight of Gravesend (where Matoaka, or Pocahontas, is buried), Marlow imagines back to the malarial colonial outpost of Londinium. His ‘quick transition from dark to light’ is a site-specific response that cables here to there, London to Congo, with lines of unbroken dark.

Wapping Hydraulic Power Station was built in 1890, a showroom of hydraulic power and precursor of the four hydraulic stations built over the next decades on the Thames that circulated power throughout the capital. Heart of Darkness was published in 1899; one can imagine Marlow and his listeners on deck catching sight of sparks struck at the great (empire) building project upriver.

When the power station ‘ceased to produce hydraulic power a tele-communications company was quick to buy its network of almost 200 miles of pipes, to run its cable along.

Electro-luminescence was used by the same company to make mobile phones screens glow green’ (Prophet’s website).

What runs through is power; what moves, circulates, is in transit, in the flicker. In the balance: empire statement buildings, glib global networks we try to occupy. Send.

Resistance.

‘The typical wire breaks down at around 180V p-p so if using an unregulated transformer back to back zeners and series current limiting resistor is essential’ (Wikipedia).

The floor of the ocean is webbed with messages pulsed pulsed pulsed as light.

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Answers from the Ocean /Transformation/ an ocean asks in waveform wavemouth singing in our bones (o it echoes) an ocean is not occam does not occur by definition how multiple its entity an ocean has two sides (or more) come together apart together an ocean answer takes forever takes it smoothes it to a perfect sphere an ocean is the shape of its waves the thunder of a thousand steps its depth echo an ocean a commotion a co-motion a concentration only 10% as saline as Lake Vanda in Antarctica an ocean as a system of cohabitation krill whale barnacle fulmar & ff. forever an ocean catches trash but (widening gyre) it cannot hold an ocean approaches changes temperature changes weather

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an ocean is a siren scatters warnings we are not. scared. enough. an ocean is as real as mermaids narwhals sailors’ yarns gps kraken deepwater horizon an ocean elaborates is elaborated an embroidery of routes blue on green on gold an ocean makes one little room an everywhere for only those who claim to rule the waves (never never never) an ocean grave unmarked by stone eroded nations populations poems by which murders could have been marked an ocean tastes of liberation bitter, but: salt roads back to the other side that should never have been other an ocean feels like memory clings to skin this salt is tears it tears at our island notion an ocean is a human designation our planet’s water has no borders

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Intensities & Surfaces /Transience/ fuck block &tackle corrosive saltheart turns hard edge to lit tears

is space seized up &breathed let it go under in& down

o ice is as elsa knows

kneel down in it lie down in it

stronger than a hundred men

& lick it liquid lucid light

Alice Butler The Peach Slip

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If I wore the jacket, Alan wore me. He was there in the wrinkles of the elbows, wrinkles that in the technical jargon of sewing are called “memory”; he was there in the stains of the very bottom of the jacket; he was there in the smell of the armpits.

Above all he was there in the smell.

Peter Stallybrass, ‘Worn Worlds: Clothing, Mourning and the Life of Things’ I remember loving the smell: a curious blend of cheap perfume, dried blush and days-old beer. The dress — peach 1920s satin silk, with two straps and a frayed frill at the bottom of two panels sewn together — had been hanging in the back of your wardrobe for thirty years when I sniffed it out, a strangely olfactory dresser. At the time, I did not ask your permission; but stole it in an illegal move of kleptomaniac madness, a criminal adolescent shaking interior walls and wooden furniture. I was just seventeen, over my smelliest years, but still guilty of a pong or two, with hair that got greasy a little too quickly, and skin that shone with liquid fume.

You were just seventeen, too, when you found it on another rail. You wore it until your adolescence died at the age of twenty-two, when you traded brown beer for black Guinness, and boots for shoes. It first got smudged in Belfast’s The Pound Club, and then again in Bristol at The Cadbury. Its hem has also grazed the flooded fields of Glastonbury.

(It’s always been a night-time dress: easy to slip on, to dance or write in.)

I think of Francesca Woodman, decaying as ‘girl’ at a tender twenty-two, in her second hand, floral dresses. Her dresses look thin, as if you can see through them, as if you can see through her, a transient fabric of flesh. She was a girl before she was a ghost in photographs, a girl who liked to wear old clothes, clothes once worn by another, clothes too big for her slight girl body. Sacks hang loose, buttons fall free, hems seek the floor, in her ephemeral black and white photographs.

In her artist book Some Disordered Interior Geometries, Francesca wears a white Victorian blouse, dotted with lace panels and snaked by embroidery. Her legs are bare, but she places her left hand over her vagina in a gesture of ownership.

And then there is the corporeal gesture of her writing: in handwritten ink that curls like vine, Francesca confesses that these things arrived from my grandmothers they make me think about where I fit in this odd geometry of time. Language helps her uncover the love in her things, finding memories in the fabric’s wrinkles.

The peach dress sought me out. It looked like the ripest fruit in the bowl — I wanted to eat it, like a young Alice — but there was no juice inside: my flesh would make it ripple later. It sparkled on the rail, amidst your boring jumpers and 90s shift dresses.

It belonged to you for a time, but it no doubt swung in the wardrobe of another mother before that: I don’t want to get special and romanticise its specificity. And yet somehow, I can feel your trace, and sense your skin, the two of us touching, re-joined in collaborative ownership. I convince myself that I can see the impression of your fingertips muddying the hem, a dream no doubt caused by the haunting image of you wearing it in a family photograph that sat on our mantel, the image as crumpled as the dress I continue to hold, both like paper (invocations to write). elin o’Hara slavick wrote on her childhood dresses in embroidered text for her 1991 Wall of Incoherent Dresses, scripts of tacked out words that she then photographed as archive objects. On a cream scrunched slip, slavick scrawled in stitches: I ATE FOOD IN THE BASEMENT, I SUCKED LILACS. I KICKED MY SISTER’S SHINS. I PICKED DANDELIONS AND SOLD THEM FOR A QUARTER. In writing, she collapses her child body into her adult one, in a material performance of the transience of memory.

Wearing the peach dress now is a cannibalisation of your adolescent self, and mine, with additional inscriptions of time past. I sucked on sweets, and sucked boy’s faces in that dress, and now it is helping me to suck on writing in this event of remembering and love.

I cannot let it go. I hang onto this flimsy souvenir as a way to divert feelings of loss, of disappearance,

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to suspend the promise of death. As Susan Stewart writes in On Longing: We do not need or desire souvenirs of events that are repeatable. Rather we need and desire souvenirs of events that are reportable, events whose materiality has escaped us, events that thereby exist only through the invention of narrative.

I fetishise the slip’s history, and also its shape, in a way that is almost sexual. Freud pictured the female ‘clothing fetishist’ as just another hysteric: sick, warbling and wayward, she was not equipped with the same agency of controlled perversion as was supposedly enjoyed by the masculine fetishist. I fetishise dresses as material and memory; I fetishise that silk in the same way that I fetishise writing: both give me pleasure. Both use my hands in haptic combat.

I gaze at the photographic souvenir. You are eighteen: a year after you found it, and you look weirdly dressed up for a day at the beach, devouring ice cream as readily as you ate silks. A dress is never ‘just’ a dress, when it is a fragment of a body, a thread of a life. As Carol Mavor writes: … clothing is perishable, and because it takes on the body (it takes form, smells, dirt) it makes a “second grave for the loved being,” even before death, but especially after death.

I am writing this text before death. It is a second grave for a loved being that shows the living embodiment of writing.

The dress is an empty container of things once said, once written, and bodies touched. It traps memories and words in its forgotten wrinkles. It works like an absorbent second skin, with rips that forget to heal. As Dodie Bellamy writes of a clothing clash encounter she once had with a friend over a stolen garment: Even then I sensed that an appropriated blouse is not just any blouse, it leaves traces of its original owner… to be perverted in time, and bodily trespass.

Like skin that cannot mend, the peach silk has always been sort of scratched, as if a cat had once got to it, its warp and weft disturbed. I wore it scratched, too, as I slid on my ripped fishnet tights and troweled on the eyeliner, before a night of martini and lemonade would rub it all off. I was somehow you and not you: a delicate simulation and a perverse performance, invading your body, possessing it, re-owning it with sartorial scratches.

The dress dangled empty from its wooden hanger, like the tattered and floating pink dresses of Louise Bourgeois’s fabric sculptures. Pink Days and Blue Days and Peach Days.

Caught mid-flight, the dress appeared uncanny and disembodied, locked into a state of enduring transience, before I filled it up with my changing adolescent body, transforming the youthful one it once it draped, before I arrived. I fixed its hem, stitched it fresh, in a longing desire to preserve and pervert her in equal measure.

I appropriated its emptiness with flesh and activity, with feverish intent to make it new and wear it out. Scratch it harder, my Grade II listed slip. Write upon it with a slip of the hand, transforming its narrative.

These fragments arrive like broken stitches, or the parts of a pattern before the dress is made. If, in the technical jargon of sewing, wrinkles mean memory, then could sewing also be a synonym for writing? Because that is how I find them. It is close to how Zoe Leonard found them, too, when she mourned for her friend, the artist David Wojnarowicz, who died from AIDS in 1992, in the sutured shapes of sewn together fruit fragments in Strange Fruit (for David) (1992-1997). She stitches torn skins in a desire to get closer to the person she has lost: threading bodies together in a repetitious act of perverse and passionate love.

I’ve been wondering if this is a memorial to my love of you, or my love of clothes, or my love of writing. Probably all three, like Peter Stallybrass’s ‘Worn Worlds’ lecture to Allon White, or Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s collaboratively written conversation with Michael Moon that memorialises Divine, the oversized diva of John Waters’s films, who died decked out in fringe and nylon. (Or that’s how I have dreamt it.)

Eve begins her Divine text with a dream of her shopping in a department store: she is frightened that they wouldn’t have any dresses big enough for her lusciously flabby frame, and then is delighted when they do, the store’s symbol sizing revealing an intimate connection with the gigantic garment queerness of Divine. Eve writes in her clothing reverie: I was dubious about whether they would have any clothes that would be big enough for me, but a saleswoman said they did, adding that rather than being marked by size numbers, each size-group of clothes was garnered under a graphic symbol: over here, she said, were the clothes that would fit me.

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“Over here” referred to a cluster of luscious-looking clothes, hung on a rack between two curtained dressing rooms.

The graphic symbol that surmounted them was a pink triangle.

I woke up extremely cheerful.

I don’t need to dream how Divine’s friend, the writer Cookie Mueller, was dressed on her deathbed. The photographic souvenir is a cue to my fantasy. She is a blond Cleopatra, gold in all senses, with bangles stacked up to her elbow, so tight she could not breathe. Flowers framed her face; cigarette butts were thrown like confetti. I struggle to separate how much I adore her clothes with how much I adore her writing: intimate, material attachments.

With her own line of clothing that had embroidered ‘COOKIE’ labels hidden on the inside, Cookie was a part-time fashion designer alongside her work of writing, the two vocations emerging slyly in her stories, as when she confesses to her tantalising outfit for hitchhiking: I, the blond, was dressed conservatively in a see-through micro-mini dress and black velvet jacket. I long to see her, smell her, and touch that transparent fabric, but instead it’s her words that touch me, and my writing her … that makes a second mesh, with hands that sew.

More sombre, Susan Sontag chose a pleated Fortuny Delphos gown for her funeral, ever the full-time writer in love with literary references. Fortuny’s dresses are repeatedly described by Proust in In Search of Lost Time. But I prefer the smelly mess of Cookie, the ripped red nylon of Divine, the dirty folds of Francesca, the bloodied lace of Kathy Acker. Like you, and like me, they are all adolescent dressers, rebellious in their rejection of time, as they firmly chose old clothes, as ragged as their texts, bodies and photographs.

In her memorial to Kathy Acker’s clothes and language, Dodie Bellamy, as fan and author, dreams of her dead friend’s lace, her jewellery, her stretchy garments that pulled tightly across her body, and all those designer garments she didn’t take good care of. Vivienne Westwood constructed corsetry bloodied by the ketchup of a burger. Or Jean Paul Gaultier browned by bolognese. In ‘Digging Through Kathy Acker’s Stuff’, Dodie infiltrates the master bedroom in Kathy’s executor’s home, and with boxes of her things hidden in corners, Dodie imagines what my piece of Kathy jewelry will look like, ornate amethyst-studded silver like the piece I saw on

the table at her memorial ceremony. Touching her objects in spectral, corporeal intimacy, an intimacy found in writing, Dodie asks herself: Will Kathy’s stuff change me, will it work some spell on my life? A spell of language, of license, the barefaced permission of the writer to wear, steal, and possess all that she touches in life and writing. In pilfering Kathy’s boxes, Dodie pilfers Kathy’s way of writing, an attitude that is found in wearing another body’s clothes as literary kleptomania.

Carol Mavor, as a lover of Proust (who, as we know, was a lover of Fortuny) has written of the sewing that occurs in In Search of Lost Time as being a metaphor for the Narrator’s life writing, the novel as a whole. First, she admits, it is the image of the cathedral, which serves as the overriding image of the book’s novelistic structure, but by the final volume (Time Regained), the Narrator muses upon his mendingwriting. He looks upon his servant’s sewing that fixes up old clothes, and sees in each stitch the move of each word, the building of its writing. Proust writes as Marcel: I should construct my book, I dare not say ambitiously like a cathedral, but simply like a dress.

For the 2005 exhibition at The Wapping Project, Jules Wright put stolen dresses in an industrial cathedral, of which I am writing here, stitching its pieces together in anticipation of the final garment. I wish I could have been there to touch, graze, and smell those empty silks that galloped around on a carousel inviting wandering hands. Inside the empty boiler room span disembodied dresses, tempting perverse acts of kleptomaniac desire, childhood play or adolescent rebellion. Dresses made like buildings (or texts) moved in a way that showed the movement of their making. Kathy would’ve loved to get messy with these garments, shoes and hats, dreamt up by young designers like Roksanda Illincic, Gareth Pugh, Preen, Siv Stoldal and Robert Cary-Williams. I long to scratch their spinning fabrics, but instead it is my writing that scratches, the dream of being there lived out here in a text(ile) that mends. I write with a slip of a hand to give shape to the lost bodies that wore them, and helped them speak. I play as I write, as I play when I dress, like when I stole my mother’s peach slip and imagined I was the poet Mina Loy, with her lampshade earrings and androgynous slips — roomy enough to write in.

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Lavinia Greenlaw A poet’s difficulty with words after Mark Wallinger

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Apprehension To be caught in the act — any act.

Gesture A dream of making direct contact.

Image The mind forcing the eye to conclude.

In black and white A refusal to decide which is silence and which phrase.

Focus The need to go so far that there is no coming back.

Movement Simultaneous disarrangement and orchestration.

Expression The need to forget what I am doing.

Development That I am not I.

Vessel What I, in my symmetry, invite.

Capacity What I, in my symmetry, arrest.

Reflection I will over-turn.

Language As a form of curiosity.

Tone Resistance to atmosphere.

Description Resistance to experience.

Deletion Must remain.

Rhyme Occurring emphatically within the confines of the self.

Density Turning inwards in order to form.

Fray Trying to keep human shape.

Bathos As a form of superstition.

Self-explanatory As in explaining to the self.

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Purpose To fulfil the act of making.

Function I write to find out.

A flaw Exemption.

Oversight Truculence in the face of meaning.

Digression An investment in what might related.

Concentration The reader as a form of dilution.

Validation The same use of the same words.

Shadow Because the I of the poem is not the first person but the person.

I am still I Because the I must be on intimate terms with itself in order to undress itself.

Language As a form of curiosity.

Uncertainty As a form of commitment.

Absence To which nothing must adjust.

Completion An arrangement that can place what is not its part.

Argument The insecurity of subject and object.

Intention Years later.

A record Without which, was it said?

Abandonment To return to the moment of apprehension.

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Andrea Luka Zimmerman A Feature Documentary

The majority of lives are lived in history. There are, however, a few lives that make history. If that history is dark, occupying the shadowlands and margins of what is known or acceptable, then the price of that making can be high, very high indeed…

Lt. Col. James Gordon ‘Bo’ Gritz — “the American Soldier” for the Commander-in-Chief of the Vietnam War — is one of the most decorated combatants in US history. The inspiration for Rambo, the A-Team’s Colonel John ‘Hannibal’ Smith and Brando’s Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, Gritz was at the heart of the American military and foreign policy — both overt and covert — from the Bay of Pigs to Afghanistan.

He has been financed by Clint Eastwood and William Shatner, who supported his ‘deniable’ missions searching for American POWs in Vietnam. He has exposed US government drug running, turning against the Washington elites as a result. He has run for President, created a homeland community in the Idaho wilderness, and trained Americans in strategies of counter-insurgency against the incursions of their own government.

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He has also killed at least 400 people, often in the most appalling manner… He embodies contemporary American society in all its dizzying complexity and contradiction. Today, Bo lives in the Nevada desert where he once secretly trained Afghan Mujahedeen. He is loved and admired by his community. He sleeps with many weapons. He finds it hard to sleep…

Filmed with Bo over 10 years, Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s remarkable portrait of an individual and a country in crisis explores the implications — on a personal and collective level — of identities founded on a profound, even endemic violence.

It examines the propagation of that violence through Hollywood and the mass media, the arms trade and ongoing governmental policy.

Deploying confessional and exploratory interviews, news and cultural footage, creative re-enactment and previously unseen archive material (including the training of Afghan Mujahedeen and proof of the CIA’s drug-dealing out of South East Asia), the film proposes a multi-layered investigation of war as a social structure, a way of being for individuals and countries. In what is becoming an era of ‘permanent conflict’, this could not be more relevant.

At the film’s heart, however, moving far beyond political reportage or investigation, necessary as they are, lies a compelling enquiry into the nature of human conscience and the limits of deniability (whether to oneself or others).

When redemption is no longer an option, the psyche needs to find other ways to live with itself. This film asks what those ways might be. It looks into the heart of darkness; it looks for slivers of light.

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Voices from Berlin Residents of The Wapping Project — Berlin

The Wapping Project Berlin is a residency programme in Kreuzberg Berlin, which provides a space and period of rest, recreation and reflection for mid-career artists and practitioners. It is a condition of the residency that no work is produced during the period of the programme. The residency programme started in 2015 and it is open to a wide field of practitioners. We collected the voices of the first artists that were awarded the residency.

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“... This was a truly magical time and space for me and my son Kosmo... I tried to do and grasp everything special during our stay. For the first time in my adult life, magic started happening when I stopped trying.”

Maija Mustonen, Summer 2016 Maija Mustonen is a Helsinki-based dance artist.

She is working as a director, choreographer and performer within the fields of new dance, performance and fine art and has authored a number of collaborative pieces with artists from different creative backgrounds and disciplines. She has a master degree in Fine Arts (Academy of Fine Arts, Finland) and a BA (hons) in contemporary dance (Laban Centre, London).

“I began wondering what had taken place within the walls of my temporary residence in Kreuzberg, who and what had occupied its spaces, the memories it had absorbed and how they might reverberate like an internal echo. The condition of the residency, that ‘NO work be produced’ feels counter intuitive to an artist, however this limitation is definitely its greatest strength. Whatever working practices you bring to Berlin, they become subject to the emptiness of the apartment and the agreement not to produce any work. This imposes real but transforming and liberating constraints. The Wapping Project Berlin introduced me to the complexities of a city constantly in states of change and provided me with a unique opportunity to refocus and take in information from unexpected sources.”

Zara Matthews, Autumn 2015 Zara Matthews MA (RCA) is a London based artist working with painting and photography. She exhibits nationally and internationally, most recently in The East End Academy Painting Edition — Whitechapel Gallery, 2009; Wall of Light — Standpoint Gallery, London 2010; Swarovsky Art Icon Award Auction — Whitechapel Gallery, London 2014. She was nominated for the Max Mara Art Prize 2016 -17 and awarded The Wapping Project Berlin Residency 2015.

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“...Sitting here surrounded by white walls, tucked in safely.

Sitting inside the blank sheet of paper in a home quite the opposite of mine — a crowded one bedroom. Feeling totally relaxed, filled to equal measure with energy and tranquility and hopeful about my artistic future... Starting new work in the Autumn and not fearing that ideas will simply dry up.”

Dana Sederowsky, Summer 2015 Dana Sederowsky is a Swedish artist working with video performance, photography and extensive handwritten texts covering large wall areas. She explores various dimensions of the human condition, often with a tinge of the absurd by carrying out her self set tasks. Focusing on human psychology, the use of language, and the apparent meaninglessness of life, she employs repetition and repeated motifs as her means of expression and method. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including at Fotografiska Stockholm, Göteborgs Konsthall, the Centres for Contemporary Art in Ekaterinburg and Moscow and at the L.A. International Art Biennale, Robert Berman Gallery, Los Angeles.

NEIN KEIN ARBEIT, Dana Sederowsky, 2015 202 sheets of A4 papers, marker pen, tape.

The Wapping Project Berlin, AIR Summer. 2015

Contributors

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Sophie Mayer is the author of several poetry collections, most recently, (O) (Arc, 2015) and kaolin (Lark Books, 2015), and of Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (IB Tauris, 2015). Her current project is Disturbing Words, http://tinyletter.com/sophiemayer/.

Alice Butler is a writer based in London and a PhD student in Art History & Visual Studies at the University of Manchester.

She is working on women’s experimental writing and feminist performance, and her work has been published in frieze, Cabinet and Art Monthly.

Lavinia Greenlaw has published five collections of poetry, most recently A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde.

Her other works include The Importance of Music to Girls and Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland. Audio Obscura, her immersive soundwork for Artangel won the 2011 Ted Hughes Award. Her first short film, The Sea is an Edge and an Ending, is released this autumn.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman is an artist and filmmaker based in London. Zimmerman grew up on a large council estate and left school at 16. After coming to London in 1991, she attended Central St. Martins. Her work includes two feature length documentaries: the Grierson nominated Estate, a Reverie (2015) and Taskafa, Stories of the Street (2013).

Zimmerman won the Artangel Open Award for her collaborative drama feature Cycle (2017) with Adrian Jackson.

The Wapping Project would like to especially thank its members. The writing commissions published here were made directly possible by their generous and continued support.

The Wapping Project would also like to thank all the contributors, the WPT Board members, Gareth Evans for his help and insight, Regent Street Cinema for hosting the event, Atelier Dyakova and Benedict de Silva.

The Wapping Project

The Wapping Project is a platform for risk taking and the continuous development of ideas, thoughts and people.

It is our investment in, and enthusiasm for, the artists that we commission that forms the backbone of the artistic programme. The Wapping Project questions and aims to redefine accepted boundaries through commissioning, nurturing and championing artistic talent. We exist to enable artists to work with unrestrained ambition.

The Wapping Project (Women’s Playhouse Trust) is a registered charity N° 286384 www.thewappingproject.org info@thewappingproject.org

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Published to coincide with the launch of The Wapping Project Commissions Edition of 600 Designed by Atelier Dyakova Printed by PUSH, London Copyright Š The Wapping Project and individual contributors and authors, 2016.

All Rights Reserved.

No reproduction, copy or transmission, in whole or in part, may be made without prior written permission.

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