January's Top 5

The festive period is over but there is no need to feel blue. The weather may still be awful, the food and drink hangovers from Christmas may still be hideous but we have the perfect solution to lift you out of your PFD (Post-Festive Depression). So chin up and get out to these great events and shows in London to help you march into 2012 with a smile on your face.

1. London International Mime Festival (LIMF) 2012

Admittedly this is a slightly obscure way to start this list but stick with us! This festival takes part across London at venues including Soho Theatre, Southbank Centre, Barbican, Roundhouse and the Royal Opera House. At this festival you can see the very best in mime, mask work, acrobatics, circus skills, animation and puppetry.

Artists featured this year come from Australia, Belgium, France, Japan, Spain and Switzerland alongside some outstanding homegrown British companies.

LIMF lasts for nineteen days and nights. The festival will present to the public cutting edge circus, magic, mime. Mask and object theatre. This is truly a festival for all the family with after show discussions and opportunites to learn some of the skills!
For more info on exact dates on events and workshops check the website at

www.mimelondon.com/index.html

2. London Ice Sculpting Festival

We now that since September you have been constantly battling the cold to get out of bed in the morning so why would you want to see something that is even colder than laminate flooring on a winter’s day?
 

Well, we’ll tell you why you should head down to Canada Square for this festival. It features artists from around the world who will captivate you with their talent s and competitive spirit. There are other events going on to.
 

One that might make the impending bitter cold better is the Snow Pit in Montgomery Square. Having no snow to play with when it has been this cold seems unfair to us, the festival has rectified this. In the Snow Pit you can enjoy making snowmen and snowcastles whatever the weather in this covered area of REAL SNOW.
 

You can also head down to the Frost Fayre for specially themed hot winter food and drinks to warm you up.
 

With lot more events to enjoy you really are spoilt with this winter wonder!

www.londonicesculptingfestival.co.uk/

3. Forgotten Spaces at Somerset House

This exhibition explores the future development of our cities differently. On exhibition are submitted proposals for overlooked spaces across Greater London. The exhibitors were selected after the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). Entries came in from architects, engineers, students and designers of all kinds.

Entries tackled forgotten spaces across the city including land left abandoned under flyovers, unloved green verges and disused car parks. The exhibitors’ projects give their ideas of how they can be reclaimed. The exhibition explores alternative ways to use and interact with urban space.
 

Best of all, the exhibition includes some of our very own Bow Artists!
 

The exhibition itself is in Somerset House’s own forgotten spaces – the lightwell and coalholes surrounding the Edmond J Safra Fountain Court and the hidden passage known as the Deadhouse. The exhibition is made up of models, 1:1 installations, images, and multimedia pieces which tackle proposals including festival firepits in Crystal Palace, artist inhabited church spires across the City, and urban climbing tunnels under Clapham High Street to name just a few.
 

Open daily until 29 January 2012, 10am - 6pm, in the South Wing of Somerset House, free admission.
 

www.londonsartistquarter.org/events/forgotten-spaces-bow-arts-artists-somerset-house

4. Simon Mathers, The Patterns of Fur and Themes of Still and Running Water at MOT International

MOT International London present their newly represented artist Simon Mathers in his first solo exhibition in the UK. After graduating from the Royal College of Art Mathers continued to explore and expand his processes and modes of production.
Using abstraction as a tool enables Mathers to work with images on a plane that is not indebted to figuration but rather, a plane in which figuration, colour, surface, texture and mark-making might be concurrently explored.
His varnish prepared grounds achieve lucent effects, while fore grounded strokes become shorthand for landscapes, or the details of hair; forms that often gesture to a fragmentary imprint of what they might depict, rather than absolute portraiture. Frequently, images appear half-remembered or partly-translated, with the simplicity of his marks withholding as much as they reveal. Having a viscosity of form and surface, Mathers experimental techniques create colourings in which pooled materials are cut with solvent lines.

www.londonsartistquarter.org/events/simon-mathers
 

5. Zarina Bhimji at Whitechapel Gallery

This 25-year survey of the Ugandan-born artist's poetic film and photographic works features the premiere of her film, 'Yellow Patch', (2011), which is inspired by trade and migration across the Indian Ocean. Other works which explore the archeology and psychology of place include 'Out of Blue', (2002) and 'She Loved to Breathe- Pure Silence', (1987).

Landscapes and buildings haunted by their layered histories are the protagonists in her photographs and large-scale film installations. India and East Africa are the repeat locations for her poetic foray into the archaeology of place.

Zarina Bhimji was born in Mbarara, Uganda in 1963 to Indian parents, and moved to Britain in 1974, two years after the expulsion of Uganda’s Asian community in the Idi Amin era. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2007.

Rarely seen earlier works are presented alongside these ambitious film narratives. Combining black-and-white photographs with colourful spices, She Loved to Breathe- Pure Silence (1987), comments on controversial immigration protocols in Britain during the 1970s, while photographs taken in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Gamble Room and its galleries of Indian art in 1989 pay a tender tribute to this treasure trove of late nineteenth-century Britain.

Lightboxes and large format photographs from Cleaning the Garden (1998), first commissioned for Harewood House, Leeds, and the Love Series (2001–06), panoramic photographs rooted in the research for Out of Blue (2002) are also on view.
 

www.whitechapelgallery.org/home

Well, that’s our January sorted! Have you got any other events we should be making noise about? If you do get in contact on twitter @BowArtsTrust or via email media@bowarts.com

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