Institute of Contemporary Arts

Air Guitar An Education

Date: 15 April 2008

I sit two desks down from the Director of Learning here, Emma-Jayne Taylor (no she's not a country singer) and we thought it might be interesting to document one of her projects as part of my audio blog posts.  Undercurrents is a ten week programme of weekly sessions run by the artist Emily Candela with a group of young adults with learning difficulties and their support worker Gareth.  Six weeks ago I started to attend the Undercurrents workshops with my recorder, capturing the sessions and interviewing some of the people involved.  It's been amazing!  I've never spent any time with people with learning difficulties and had imagined they would seem much younger than their years but instead I found six fascinating adults whose response to art is a mature and sensitive one.

In the third week they were shown a film by the artist Sonia Boyce who has since been working with them on the project.  Part documentary, part performance the film For You Only You showed a classically trained choir collaborating with avant-garde singer and composer Mikhail Karikis.  Their final piece was performed in a church, it was very moving and as I watched I wondered whether the strange sounds Mikhail was making would be too weird and alienating for a group who have had very little experience of contemporary art in any form.  The response from the group was unanimously enthusiastic and they were clearly moved.  Danny, one of the men in the group who has some quite serious language difficulties spontaneously stood at the front of the cinema and made a speech followed by his own interpretation of the singing he had just witnessed.  What better response could Sonia want!

The project only has a few weeks to go and they are currently busy working on their final pieces which will be shown at the end of the project on the 9th May.  As you can see in the image above their response to art has been very lively and i look forward to seeing the final works.  To hear more about the project and get to know some of the people involved please click the link below and let me know what you think.

All of my interviews and recordings will also be available as part of the Learning section of the website.

Sonia Boyce's performance and video installation are currently being shown by the Milton Keynes Gallery, www.mk-g.org

 

Listen now (mp3)

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