East End exhibitions – five of the best for August
“From intricate ink drawings to block-colour sculptures”: a pair of works from Making Faces. Photograph: Headway East London
Making Faces @ Royal Festival Hall
Southbank Centre, Belvedere Rd, SE1 8XX
You can read about brain injury charity Headway East London’s supper club later this week, but next month its members will turn their hands to intellectual nourishment as well. Making Faces comprises a specially commissioned installation and mixed-media works by over 30 artists, all from Submit to Love – Headway’s creative collective who use art in navigating their recovery. One artist, Billy, says the show describes the often “scary, hard, cold, remote and very baffling” experience of life post-injury.
Georgia Ward, Head of Festival Site Design at the Southbank Centre, told the Citizen of her enthusiasm for the collection: “The quality and variety of the visual arts from Headway’s Submit to Love Studios was something we wanted to share with audiences here. From intricate ink drawings to block-colour sculptures, each piece tells a story about the artist that created it.” The work is loosely themed around the human face, and visitors can also meet the artists from Submit to Love Studios on Thursday 17 August from 12 noon – 1.30pm in the exhibition space. From 3 August until 23 August
southbankcentre.co.uk | headwayeastlondon.org
Into the Unknown @ Barbican Centre
Silk St, EC2Y 8DS
Curated by Patrick Gyger – former director of Switzerland’s fascinating sci-fi/utopian museum Maison d’Ailleurs (House of Elsewhere) – the Barbican’s latest ambitious, multi-part exhibition has been running since 3 June, with thousands voyaging through the collection of movie memorabilia, visionary video and ruminations on the future of mankind.
The show, which includes original models from Jurassic Park and a computer-generated version of Blade Runner, is not the final frontier of futurology at the Barbican next month – classic sci-fi cinema will also be coming to the centre’s outdoor Sculpture Gallery on 25 to 27 August. Tron (the original one), Gravity (the 2D version) and 2001: A Space Odyssey will be screened, as will Georges Méliès influential 1902 silent film, A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la Lune). Until 1 September
Body horror: an image from Kôji Wakamatsu’s Ecstasy of the Angels (1972), featured in Nature of the Hunt
Auto Italia and Harman Bains: Nature of the Hunt @ Auto Italia South East
44 Bonner Rd, E2 9JS
In the immortal words of imperialist racist Rudyard Kipling and, latterly, that song from the Impulse body-spray advert: “The female of the species is more deadly than the male.” Horror and exploitation cinema auteurs use imagery of the “monstrous female” – blood, sex and an animalistic drive to kill – to critique our wider culture (as well as to titillate and scare the bejesus out of people, of course).
Writer and researcher Harman Bains – whose stated interests of “the human [body’s] biological extremes, psychosexual fantasy, transmutation and all manner of erotic mania” mark her out as an ideal dinner party guest – collaborates with artist-run organisation Auto Italia to look at this phenomenon, in this exhibition and associated events programme. Until 3 September
Project Indigo @ Sutton House
2 & 4 Homerton High St, E9 6JQ
Mayor Glanville stands with Project Indigo members and staff at their exhibition’s launch, at Sutton House. Photograph: Off Centre
Fresh from forming part of Hackney’s biggest ever contingent at London Pride, the young members of Project Indigo present an exhibition at Sutton House, the borough’s oldest residential building. The group, organised by charity Off Centre and championed by our columnist I’m Empire, offers support to LGBTQIA youngsters in a relaxed way, providing space for people to discuss issues and make friends.
The wide spectrum of artwork and poetry covering the historic walls showcases Project Indigo members’ “joy, intelligence, love, wit, magic, creativity and political consciousness”. The show forms part of Sutton House’s School of Anarchy season, which runs through the summer holidays and also hails the manor house’s short history as a squatted community centre in the 80s. Until 3 September
offcentre.org.uk/project-indigo | nationaltrust.org.uk/sutton-house
Emma Hart, Mamma Mia! @ Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High St, E1 7QX
Emma Hart spent the back end of last year in Italian cities Milan, Todi and Faenza, laid on by the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, which she won. She used the time to diligently research practices unique to the nation – notably the practice of maiolica, a kind of tin-glazed pottery, and the Milan Systems Approach, a form of family therapy that focuses on repeated actions, and how to break them.
Potty: an installation view of Emma Hart’s Mamma Mia! Photograph: Thierry Val
Pairing the two, Mamma Mia! is a study of psychology and repetition in ceramics. Hart’s glossy vases and jugs are embossed with speech bubbles, questioning faces and vivid patterns, forming a reflection on a family-driven culture alien to Hart, who told The Independent in 2015 that she had “never been out of London for more than three weeks”. Until 3 September