Points of Departure 17

6 Points of Departure estuaryfestival.com 7 Shorelines overview Points of Departure is Estuary 2016’s visual arts programme. The exhibition features works by 26 contemporary artists Points of Departure in the Grade II* listed Tilbury Cruise Terminal, waterborne venues on the Thames and across the river in Gravesend. The exhibition takes place at the point where the Thames 17– 30 September loses its city brackishness and becomes saline and marine, as the tides carry the river out to the North Sea. Works explore the landscape, history and rich culture of the Thames Estuary reflecting themes of arrival, departure, Venues: Grade II* listed Tilbury Cruise Terminal, migration, connection, and nationhood via the estuary Ferry Road, Tilbury RM18 7NG out to the wider world. High Street, Gravesend DA11 0AZ On 21 June 1948 the MV Empire Windrush docked at Town Pier, Gravesend DA11 0BJ Tilbury, bringing the first wave of West Indian immigrants to the UK from the Caribbean. Points of Departure takes Special 17 & 18 September this key moment in British history as a starting point, and festival 11am–7pm, with multiple talks, examines the way that artists are responding to issues of weekend: events, performances and boats place and identity in the twenty first century. Questions are raised about how and where we find home, about Exhibition 11am–4pm daily (closed 24 September) the local and the global, against a backdrop of steadily continues: School tours and workshops available increasing, forced human migration across the world, due to violent conflict and environmental catastrophe. FREE The Tilbury Cruise Terminal and other exhibition venues provide an incredible location for the artists to consider the rich history of the Thames Estuary, and to explore contemporary concerns. We are delighted to present a number of new commissions for Points of Departure, many developed in residency at Metal in Southend, exhibited alongside specially selected existing works. The exhibition takes in film, sound, photography, drawing, text, sculpture and installation. The exhibition also includes new works by a number of artists who took part in a professional development creative lab at Metal earlier in 2016. Curated by Gareth Evans and Sue Jones. ‘Here the impulse to migrate to another land has its roots in impulses to do with curiosity, love and a hunger for otherness – impulses more elemental than economically deterministic explanations.’ Image: MOTHER, I AM GOING (still) by Webb Ellis Sukhdev Sandhu on Mnemosyne by John Akomfrah 8 Points of Departure Numbers refer to location map on page 52 Numbers refer to location map on page 52 estuaryfestival.com 9 Angus Carlyle, 1 Adam Chodzko, 3 Colin Priest, 5 Gideon Mendel, 8 A Crossing Bell (2015) Ghost (2010 – 2016) Waiting Rakes (2016) Drowning World (2007–15) Installed near the Tilbury ferry within Often called White Weed, Neptune a custom-built wooden shelter that Plant or Sea Moss, the harvest of these offers views over the wide river, the fragile, coral-like plants with rakes used engraved bell is there to be rung by to be a commonplace seasonal industry passengers and festival-goers as they across the Estuary. Waiting Rakes offer their prayers for a crossing (their is a new work by Priest awakening own or someone else’s, a friend’s or a these stories with found footage and stranger’s, a crossing here at the Thames a collectible daily ‘public notice’ in the or one that lies further afield). Southend Echo during the festival. John Akomfrah, 2 Jeremy Deller, 6 Ghost is a kayak; a sculpture as vessel, Mnemosyne (2010) Five Memorials (2004) coffin, bed, costume and camera rig. It is designed to ferry people to the ‘island One of five memorial banners by the of the dead’, with a rower at the back, Turner Prize winning artist, Five Memorials and the passenger lying down low and pays tribute to the MV Empire Windrush flat in the front, like a body in a coffin docking at Tilbury Cruise Terminal with their head slightly raised, travelling in 1948 which marked the start of A series of images that explore the along the interface between water and post-war immigration to the UK. personal impact of climate change sky. A camera, mounted on Ghost’s within a global context, taking us deck, records each unique voyage, the beyond faceless statistics into the Heidi Wigmore, 7 passengers’ point of view, from across its individual experiences of victims. Mind Control Tower (2016) bows. The video archives from multiple Flood survivors are photographed in journeys along four previous Ghost Following a residential Culture LAB deep floodwater, within the remains passages (The rivers Swale, Tamar, at Metal, contemporary ‘prayer flags’ of their homes or in submerged Tyne and Thames) here joins new video recalling the Bata shoe factory’s Utopian landscapes. The photographs have footage made this summer from the promise and demand of ‘Shoes for been taken by Mendel in flood zones Essex Ghost voyages made by a group All’ and the shoes recovered from The around the world, in Haiti, Pakistan, of estuarine insomniacs, to be shown London shipwreck. Previewed at Tilbury Australia, Thailand, Nigeria, Germany alongside Ghost itself, held suspended before being installed at Coalhouse Fort and the Philippines, between 2007 in the Tilbury Cruise Terminal. on Sunday 25th September with a live and 2015. Drowning World was Exhibited for the first time since its event at 6pm. shortlisted for the Prix Pictet Prize 2015. premiere at BFI Gallery, Mnemosyne Taylor Smith, 4 is a powerful film installation that Jelly Belly (2016) Webb-Ellis 9 uses a vast array of archival material Seasick (2016) MOTHER. I AM GOING (2014) to hauntingly recast and retell the experiences of postwar immigrants Following a residential Culture to the UK – resuscitating the now LAB at Metal in Southend, Smith familiar images of our multicultural and shows two new, brief narrative films diasporic histories. Mnemosyne refers situated amongst the landscapes and to the mother of the nine Muses, the demographics of the Thames Estuary. personification of memory in Greek The first follows an anecdotal recalling mythology. Akomfrah’s tone poem of three boys playing out on the mud, is split into verses named after the set to a disparate exchange of visual daughters of Mnemosyne: Epic Poetry, narrative threads, flitting from the real Tragedy, History, Music, Sacred Song, to the imagined. The second, Seasick Astronomy, Comedy, Erotic Love and details an interview with footballer Dance. The work’s striking sound design and Southend United legend Freddy A three-screen audio-visual installation weaves together documentary, was created by Akomfrah’s fellow Black Eastwood that pays homage to the Sky filmed in an abandoned village in performance and archive footage Audio founder, Trevor Mathison. Sports dressing room interview style. southern Bulgaria, and on the North East to explore memory’s relationship coast of England. The work, by British/ with the cinematic image, and the Canadian filmmakers Webb-Ellis, discontinuity of history. 10 Points of Departure Numbers refer to location map on page 52 Numbers refer to location map on page 52 estuaryfestival.com 11 French & Mottershead, 10 Sound installation based on a series of Jem Finer, 15 Sam Williams, 18 Waterborne (2016) visits to sales houses on either side of the 51o 30’ 44” N, 0o 0’ 38” E Until they feel – ahead estuary that reimagines the auctioning (2015) of them – a barrier (2016) An immersive audio work offering of livestock as a collection of dreams. listeners an intimate and visceral An exploration in film and sound of the The penning, bartering and ringside meditation on their own mortality. location of the artist’s studio on Trinity procession of these four-legged animals Waterborne describes in poetic detail Buoy Wharf. Listening and looking points to the lost layer of agricultural the course of your body’s decay as it eastwards, at the point where the industry on the river, and draws on the traverses time and place, from a canal, rivers Lea and Thames meet, the work ancient use of the Tilbury ferry as a via a tidal river, an estuary and out to draws on field recordings, musical crossing for sheep, and on its current sea. Word, voice and bodily sensations compositions and films made during use for human passengers. combine with the ambient sounds of the all hours of day and night over the estuary, working on the imagination to course of 12 months. Encompassing create a self-portrait of your own body Nastassja Simensky, 13 the cycles of the seasons and temporal, as it dissolves and fragments within the Colloquy (2014) meteorological and astronomical shifts, Sam Williams’ film work is a reflection different bodies of water. Waterborne is the work is presented as a looping film on the human body as a threshold experienced on board a boat or on the in which the dimension of sound is given between interior and exterior space. waterside, through a spoken narrative, priority over the visual. Commissioned Taking place in the post-industrial written from forensic case studies by Film and Video Umbrella. estuary landscape, the figures, like the of human bodies immersed in and architecture, appear as ghosts caught transported by water, combined with Lavinia Greenlaw, 16 in cycles of unstable and unproductive site research on the tidal Thames. The Sea is an Edge gesture. Both they and the landscape and an Ending (2016) appear at a limit, on thresholds of action Anne Lydiat, 11 and inaction, of holding and releasing, Poet Lavinia Greenlaw’s first film I am the ship, the ship is me falling and walking, expectation and investigates what it means to lose your (2016) Inspired by the wreck of The London, sunk arrival.

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