Chisenhale: Anja Kirschner and David Panos.

art
4/30/2009

Chisenhale. Its the new Whitechapel (apparently).


by Emily King


In the hands of its new director Polly Staple, the Chisenhale Gallery in Mile End is becoming an essential stop on London’s art tour. Next up in its programme is a film that sheds light on twenty-first-century celebrity and financial speculation though a story of eighteenth-century malfeasance and skullduggery, a treat for discerning fans of costume drama and camp.
For a fortnight last January the Chisenhale Gallery in London’s Mile End was transformed into a mini Pinewood Studios. The 2,500 square foot former factory, which has been used for showing art since the late 1970s, overflowed with the gamut of film-shoot accessories, right down to the catering. Inside actors recruited from the National Theatre dressed in full frock coats and powdered wigs re-enacted the adventures of the notorious 18th century jail-breaker Jack Shepherd. Orchestrating the scene as directors and producers, as well as writers and editors, were the artists Anja Kirschner and David Panos. According to Polly Staple, the gallery’s director of six-months, “With Anja and David it is like you are on a train. They’re like, ‘Are you coming with us?’”

The results of the shoot will be on view at the Chisenhale from the 7th May. A near feature-length “critical costume drama” titled The Last Days of Jack Shepherd, the film will be screened in an environment that has been restored to something like the calm of a conventional art gallery, the only evidence of January’s frenzy being a selection of props arranged in the space. It is the first exhibition in Staple’s own programme for the Gallery and, as such, is particularly dear to her. “I wanted to mark the start with something that encapsulates what I believe the Chisenhale should be doing,” she explains. “Anja and David are local, they are young, and are exploring what it is to make this sort of work in London now. They have a level of vision that is quite unique. Even before I was offered the job here, I knew they needed somewhere to make this film, it acted as a kind of marker in my head.”

The ex-director of Frieze Projects, Staple is an authoritative presence. Stylish in her laid-back minimalist get up (navy Acne chinos, Ann-Sofie Back jumper and high-top Vans), she sets out her store with convincing clarity. “It is important to define what the Chisenhale does in relation to other places,” she says, “Among the other small-scale galleries, we have the biggest and the most classically gallery-like space. Our core remit is to commission artists to make work in response to that space, and - I was amazed to discover this when I joined the gallery - because our running costs are relatively low, we can actually offer artists a much better budget than other, much larger institutions.”

Kirschner and Panos’s tale is a timely exploration of the mechanics and spectacle of boom and bust. Set just after the burst of the South Sea Bubble, Britain’s first financial crises, the eponymous Jack Shepherd became one of the earliest celebrities to be created by the nascent popular press, his eventual execution in 1724 attracting an audience of around 30,000. It is Jade meets Madoff, nearly three hundred years ago. Weaving historical and literary sources with popular tales and myth, the script is based on possible prison encounters between Shepherd and the ghostwriter of his ‘autobiography’ Daniel Defoe.

The film is also well placed, made and shown just a short journey down the road from the City. Perhaps it is too much to hope that the last remaining still-employed bankers will pop out to see it in their lunch hours, but, with the general eastward shift of the art world in the wake of the opening of the refurbished Whitechapel in early April, the Chisenhale is poised to reoccupy the prime position it held at the start of the 1990s. Back then, under the directorship of Jonathan Watkins, the gallery showed a roster of up-and-coming artists on its freshly poured concrete floor. “It used to be one of the most exciting spaces around,” according to the artist Wolfgang Tillmans. He, Rachel Whiteread, and Sam Taylor Wood all had important early shows there. “It is good to see it being reinvigorated,” adds Tillmans. 

The floor might be beginning to look a little worn now and the competition among art spaces has increased many-fold, but if anyone can generate a new focus for the Chisenhale it is Staple. After Kirschner and Panos exhibition, on the 16th July the Gallery will host a one-off performance by Bonnie Camplin, an event described as ‘a corporeal group meditation on energy, fear and love’, then an installation by the artist Tariq Alvi, who is known for his pointed and pretty use of found print, and later a new film by the Glasgow-based artist Duncan Campbell, a follow up to his brilliant recent work Bernadette (2008). All significant commissions by the pick of the current artist crop, Staple’s programme promises to reorient the London art map. 

www.chisenhale.org.uk

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