Orthodox Jewish Life - Andrew Aitchison

This review was first published in the Hackney Citizen, 15th November 2009

Original article

Madame Lillie's Presents ‘Orthodox Jewish Life – Stamford Hill’

A Photographic Exhibition by local photographer Andrew Aitchison

(Part of Photo Month 2009)

 

If you live in Hackney, you’ve seen them: otherworldly figures in black hats and coats, flowing beards and sidelocks, perhaps with an incongruous Coke can or mobile phone in hand.

They are the Hassidim, the Orthodox Jews of North-East London.

Even to other London Jews, they’re something of a mystery. This is a thoroughly self-contained community with its own schools, shops, and housing estates.

So Andrew Aitchison’s new exhibition and accompanying book constitute something of a coup. When he moved to Stamford Hill, Aitchison (originally from very un-Semitic Wiltshire) was inspired to begin a personal photography project, documenting the lives of his Orthodox Jewish neighbours.

Over five years, he gained the trust of the community through a combination of persistence and respect. The result of this trust is an exhibition of ten canvas-printed photographs offering a rare insight into the rituals and habits of Orthodox Jewish life.

Many are visually striking: ‘New Sefer Torah’, a sea of black coats and hats punctuated by pale, watchful faces, and ‘Pidyon Haben’, a richly-coloured close-up of a baby being draped in gleaming, intricate gold jewellery.

While Aitchison places his own work squarely in the documentary tradition, many of these photographs appear highly stylised. The face of the young boy learning the Torah in ‘Upsherin’ is illuminated in surrounding blackness; this may be an accidental effect, but nevertheless its light and composition is reminiscent of classical painting.

Almost all these photographs are of men; only one picture has any women in it. Aitchison explains that this is partly due to the difficulty of photographing women, and also because of his wish to respect the community’s desire for privacy.

If there’s a criticism of this exhibition, it’s that there’s no particular ethos behind it; Aitchison simply wanted to document these rarely-shown scenes.

However, the photographs are fascinating in their own right and the exhibition is worth visiting, if only to glimpse a world very nearby, but somehow very far removed.

'Orthodox Jewish Life' is at Madame Lillie’s Gallery, 10 Cazenove Rd, N16 6BD, until Sunday 6th December. Opening hours Friday - Sunday 12-6pm. To view by appointment: 07990695363. www.madamelillies.org

Spirits of Turpentine: Wiebke Dreyer and Sybille Gburek

This review was first published in the Hackney Citizen, 31 October 2009

http://hackneycitizen.co.uk/2009/10/31/spirits-of-turpentine/

This new exhibition in Stoke Newington showcases works by two artists: both female and originally from Germany, but the similarities end there.

Gburek is primarily a photographer, and most of her works here are digitally-manipulated self-portraits. In various guises (‘Aphrodite’, ‘Addict’, ‘Lover’), Gburek’s expressionless face regards the camera flatly from behind an assortment of wigs, make-up, and digitally-superimposed filigree patterns or text. These large, clean, lustrous photographs are visually appealing, with a distinctively Oriental aesthetic, although it’s difficult to draw out definite meanings from these (re)presentations of the self.

The gallery itself is an unusual space of hidden nooks and staircases; the heavy wooden beams and metal chains that hang from the ceiling evidence its former role as a sculptor’s studio. Gburek has exploited its potential; the charred fireplace in the gallery wall holds ‘Paradox of Intension’, a pair of shiny red Carvela shoes atop a pyramid of salt, and ‘I Love Your Brain’, a delicate Chinese fan, while an oryx skull draped with pearls is presented on the wall above.

Meanwhile, Dreyer’s paintings contrast sharply with this contemporary glossiness. Describing herself as a landscape painter, her works are vivid, near-abstract explosions of colour and texture. ‘Sand Circle, Large’ is a glorious spread of gold, silver, and dark chocolate trails of paint on a grainy background, with a cluster of grey pebbles in one corner, while ‘Energy Line’, a tall slim rectangle of oranges and yellows with a thick line of dark red paint curling its way up the length of the canvas, glows from one corner of the gallery. ‘Sleepthief, Large’, a stand-out work, is a lush burst of deep blues and purples, streaked with lumps of whites and paler blues and suggesting some kind of moonscape.

These are unusually direct and unpretentious paintings which communicate a powerful sense of the richness of the natural world.

'Spirits Of Turpentine' is at Madame Lillie’s Gallery, 10 Cazenove Rd, N16 6BD, until Sunday 8th November. Opening hours Friday - Sunday 12-6pm. To view by appointment: 07990695363. www.madamelillies.org

Bold Tendencies III

Broadcast from 1989 to 1994, and set in a hairdressers in Peckham, Desmond’s was one of the first British sitcoms to have a predominantly Black West Indian cast. Watched from my white North London suburban shelter, it was a window onto a mirrorworld only a few miles away.

Fast forward to August 2009. Peckham remains one of the most West Indian areas of London. Street level shopping is a riot of hairpieces, immense earrings, piles of breadfruit, callalloo and sweet mangoes, Nigerian doughnuts with lethal cholesterol levels, tilapia fish and red snapper, rum cream, aphrodisiac wine, and fifteen different brands of Supermalt. Then, unexpectedly tucked away up one of the litter-strewn alleyways, you find the Peckham Vue multiplex cinema and its hulking carapace of multistorey car park.

Over the summer, the roof of this car park was temporarily transformed for the Bold Tendencies III exhibition and Frank’s Campari bar. Finding the exhibition was a challenge in itself. The handwritten sign ‘Lifts out of order. Please use alternative lifts at the side’ directed us to a lift that threatened to be alternative in the sense of not lifting at all. Escaping at last from its aches and creaks, we found ourselves in more uncertain territory, on the 7th floor with no sign of Art at all. A sign directing us to Bold Tendencies led only to a piss-smelling lobby with three blank walls and another sign pointing back in the direction we’d come.

As we ascended, climbing the car-less ramps and trying to shake the sense of being trapped in a sadistic text adventure, we finally started to see the telltale signs of Nearby Art: loose gaggles of people with specs wearing black; abandoned sheets of A4 paper blowing in the high-up wind; distant mobile-phone braying. There were glimpses of a long-distance view between concrete columns, but not stopping to look, we pressed on up.

Eventually we emerged on to the rooftop and into a version of Peckham which had been through the looking-glass again. Up here, everyone was white. Young. Middle-class. We eschewed the jostle and bray of the overpriced Campari bar, and instead climbed up Molly Smyth’s 'Motion Towards Collapse' (a not-quite-symmetrical pile of concrete blocks) to warm ourselves with homemade blackberry gin (thanks to Dogsbody D) and admire the 360-degree views across the city.

The art works themselves, mostly minimalist metal or stone sculptures, were none of them individually especially striking, but the overall effect had something about it: odd abandoned shapes scattered across a windswept concrete plateau under the threatening August skies. Works such as James Balmforth’s 'Failed Obelisk', a broken Cleopatra’s needle topped by a jagged block of stone bouncing on a metal spring, and Theo Turpin's 'Between You and I', a diving board hovering over a sky-facing mirror, plus assorted other black, shiny, municipal, and suspended objects, looked thoroughly at home in this brutalist space.

Whether or not they added anything to it is open to question. But it succeeded as one of those school-holiday public art events; boyfriends were photographing girlfriends and fathers photographing children in a way that suggested a thousand future Facebook uploads. We wandered around this post-apocalyptic playground, drinking in the illicit views of railway sidings, until the bitter breezes got too much and we began the descent.

Back down on the lower levels, we stumbled across a cluster of installations that left us suitably discombobulated: heaps of fabric that, caught out of the corner of your eye, looked like collapsed misshapen people; a smashed-up car under a canvas sheet with a note telling you not to look underneath it; maps and scale models of nothing real. Without the rooftop panorama, without a clear sense of direction, aware of strange shapes in the shadows, there was a growing sense of the ominous in this low-roofed and unforgiving space.

We left shivering and glad to return to the relative shelter and human scale at street level.

Bold Tendencies III, Monumental Sculpture Show (Hannah Barry gallery), Level 10, Peckham Rye multistorey car park, 95a Rye Lane, London SE15 4ST. 30 June – 30 September 2009