Whitstable Biennale 2016 media partner: this is tomorrow
Whitstable Biennale 2016 AV partner: ADi
WHITSTABLE BIENNALE 2016 SPONSORS

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Whitstable Biennale 2016 is the 8th edition of the festival,
featuring new works made especially for Whitstable from
some of the UK’s most exciting artists, together with live
performances, films, talks, workshops, walks and events.
Our theme this year, The Faraway Nearby, is the title
of a wonderful book by Rebecca Solnit. The phrase comes
from the sign-off to letters written by artist Georgia
O’Keefe from New Mexico, back to family and friends in
New York. The Faraway Nearby is a book about listening,
and about telling stories, a memoir and a study of distance,
and where we might find the places we belong:
“We are all the heroes of our own stories, and one of the
arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of
another’s story, to see the vast expanse of the world that
is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life,
to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather than
be told by them.”
The Faraway Nearby has an added resonance locally,
with themes of migration and shifting populations. Kent
is on the frontline in the UK of the refugee crisis, with
huge pressure on the authorities to manage the tensions
created by increasing numbers of people arriving, and to
look after growing numbers of unaccompanied children,
looking for refuge from war torn lands.
Many of the works in this year’s festival focus directly
or indirectly on these themes of distance and closeness,
of the generosity of telling stories and sharing experiences
with people, and an understanding of the movement and
migration of people and ideas across the globe.
Drop in to the Horsebridge Arts Centre for more
information about the programme, every day from 10:00–
20:00 during the festival. You will also find a warm welcome
in The Long Table, our special festival café on the ground
floor of the Horsebridge, created by musician and composer
Matthew Herbert in collaboration with chef Rosie Sykes
and Whitstable Biennale.
WELCOME TO
WHITSTABLE
BIENNALE 2016!
Front Cover: Lucy Pawlak, Lost Beat Officer, 2016

Thank you!
Martin Barbour
Adam Chodzko
Seaview Holiday Park
All at the Horsebridge Arts
Centre
Mark Stampe
Barry Toogood
Brian Hitcham
Carole Craven
Richard and Angharad Green
Gretchen Egolf
Mitch Robertson
Daren Kearl
Terry Perk
Mike Wier
Glyn Hall-Edwards
John Davison
Steve Randall
Val Inwood
Natasha Vicars
Stephen Beasley
Tom Thumb Theatre
Wienerberger Ltd
Debby Marman
Douglas Noble
Kerry Millett
Georgia Nelson
William Godwin
Ian Bride
Whitstable Museum
WhitLit
Everyone who took the
time to apply to our Open
Submission, all of the
volunteers working with
the festival. John McPherson
and Peter Heslip, and all at
Arts Council England, Michelle
Moubarak and Andy Smith
at Canterbury City Council,
Tony Witton and Sarah Wren
at Kent County Council,
Sarah Dance at Culture
Kent, and all at Visit Kent.
Board of Trustees
Amanda Jones,
Hanne Mällinen-Scott,
Andy Malone (Chair),
Kieren Reed, Peter Stanfield,
Stephen Turner,
Rachel Wyndham Wincott.
Staff
Director: Sue Jones
Deputy Director:
Catherine Herbert
Curators: Gareth Evans,
Emma Leach and
Jennifer Thatcher
Programme curator:
Matthew de Pulford
Satellite: Charley Vines
Press: Janette Scott
Comms: Simon Steven
Readings: Rachel Connolly
Café: Siobhan McGhee
Head of Development:
Emma Wilcox
HQ: Jenny Duff, Mirka
KotuliDová and Maria Sveidahl
Interns: Sarue Jokonya,
Kiira Laurikka and Kate Fahy
Design: designbyvictoria.com
App: Apps4Arts.com
4 SCREENINGS & PERFORMANCES
14 ARTISTS’ SHORT FILMS
18 BIENNALE CINEMA
26 TALKS, READINGS & CONVERSATION
32 CAFÉ AND SPECIAL FESTIVAL DINNER
34 FESTIVAL TOURS
35 WALKS
36 FAMILY
38 SATELLITE
38 OFFSITE
40 CALENDAR
44 MAP AND KEY
VISITOR INFO
For general enquiries
about Whitstable Biennale and the programme
contact us at info@whitstablebienn com or
01843 596194 / 07957 575794.
Talk to us
Twitter: @whitbienn
Facebook.com/whitstablebiennale
Download our smartphone guide
Available for iPhones (iTunes) and Android
(GooglePlay) smartphones
Event bookings
Booking is required for some events,
see each listing for more information.
Age restrictions apply to some events.
For most bookings, see our website at
www.whitstablebiennale.com or call the
Horsebridge Arts Centre on 01227 281174.
Events are free unless stated.
whitstablebiennale.com
SUPPORT
Whitstable Biennale presents work which is free
for the public to participate in and enjoy. We rely
on both public and private support to ensure that
we can continue to commission the most promising
artists to create ambitious new works, and to work
with young people in innovative ways. Your support
goes directly to artists to develop their practice,
often at key moments in their careers and to present
audiences with the most exciting experimental
contemporary work. Artists previously shown at
the Biennale have gone on to show at some of the
most prestigious venues in the world, and to win
major prizes.
There are a number of ways in which you
can support us to continue this important work
including through joining our Friends’ schesme
or donating by text or online.
To find out more about how you can play a
part in our future success, visit our website or
contact Emma Wilcox, Head of Development
ewilcox@whitstablebiennale.com
Become a friend and support the development
of new art and ideas. Your contribution of £50
will go directly to commissioning new art.
For all of the details and benefits please go
to www.whitstablebiennale.com/support or text
WHIT16 £10 to 70070 to donate to Whitstable
Biennale and support new art and ideas.

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SCREENINGS &
PERFORMANCES
Alice Butler
Fan Letters of Love
Mon–Tues, Thurs–Sat
10:00–16:00
Barcham Sewing Machinery, 59 Harbour St,
CT5 1AG / The Fabric Shop, 46A Harbour St,
CT5 1AH / Whitknits, 5 Oxford St, CT5 1DB /
Clark’s Flower Shop, 64 Oxford St, CT5 1DG
Alice Butler is a writer and PhD researcher based
in London, specialising in the intersections
between literature, visual art and performance.
Her research is focused on late twentieth century
and contemporary women’s experimental writing,
and its relationship to the histories of feminist
performance art.
Fan Letters of Love is an exploration into
adolescence, plagiarism and kleptomania in
writing, and a performance of the fanatical love
of the critic. To adopt the fan position is to work
with bodies and texts unguarded: open to shame.
It is to flirt, desire, to cuckold and copy — in letters
to the objects of the fan’s affection and love.
Inspired by the tiny Hanuman Books, edited
by Raymond Foye and Francesco Clemente
between 1978–1996, these epistolary fan letters
have been designed, by Katie Johnston, into a
set of illustrated miniature chapbooks — small
enough to slip in your pocket. Installed within a
cluster of shops on Whitstable’s high street, the
books are to be read, devoured and shoplifted,
before the postscript of each book asks the reader
to promenade to the next shop and booklet in this
loving chain of fantasy correspondence. The love
objects addressed are predominantly from the
1980s and 90s, such as the writers Cookie Mueller,
Kathy Acker and Dodie Bellamy; but the Victorian
kleptomaniac is not forgotten in this story: she
was the first fan, the original plagiarist.
Leslie Deere
Modern Conjuring for Amateurs
11 June, 12 June
13:30–14:00, 14:30–15:00, 16:00–16:30
H3, Horsebridge Arts Centre
Originally from Tennessee, Leslie Deere is a London
based artist working with a variety of media.
In this performance, Deere explores the
confluence between scientific and esoteric
knowledge. She takes inspiration from both
contemporary theoretical physics and nineteenth
century inventions. The phonograph, radio and
the cathode ray tube all challenged people’s ideas
of what was possible in the physical world. If people
could record sound, send information by radio
wave and light a screen with subatomic particles,
could they also make contact with the spirit world?
Even now, physicists at CERN continue to study
these enigmatic particles to provide insights into
the fundamental laws of nature.
Modern Conjuring for Amateurs takes its title
from the eponymous book by J.C. Cannell, a popular
guide to learning tricks, conjuring and ventriloquism.
Deere’s performance will, for the first time, combine
her performing arts dance background with her sonic
arts training, as she creates a shared experience,
conjuring up sound and visuals with gesture.
The work is approx 30 minutes long. Booking is
essential and places are limited. Please see Leslie
Deere’s page at whitstablebiennale.com for more
details, or call 01227 281174.
Louisa Fairclough
CLOSED EYE VISION
Devised by Louisa Fairclough with composer
Richard Glover
Three quiet happenings for one or two singers in
three un-named locations exploring the ameliorating
andaffectivepotentialoftheuseofvoiceandmental
image within performance. I Wish I Could Be a
Stone and Tidal Volume are both sited close to the
water’s edge with the singers focusing on the tide.
For Awkward Relaxed two singers with eyes closed
imagine a pendulum swinging slowly back and
forth, this sets the slow rhythm of the work.
Marcia Farquhar
The iScreamers
Saturday 4 June
13:00–14:00
Head to Brices Alley, Sea Wall
A consideration of the cool confection in song and
dance. Marcia Farquhar will be drawing on the dark
sideoficecream’shistoryinasemi-autobiographical,
psycho-geographical, socio-economical lecture
accompanied by action painting and live music.
The show will offer a variety of one-time-only
unmissable attractions!

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Marcia Farquhar
Rooty Tooty and Based on a true story
involving my mother, myself, an unknown
old couple, a green ice cream and a hedge
4–12 June
11:00–17:00
View in the window / buy from the counter,
Sundae, Sundae
Recalling Mr Punch’s war cry, the Biennale ice
cream’s name was suggested by artist Marcia
Farquhar who saw red and white stripes as ‘the
way to do it’. Rooty Tooty is being developed by
artist Chris Conway, the legendary creative force
behind oyster ice cream, who is putting the root
back into Rooty Tooty in his inimitable style.
Without giving the game away this maestro of
cool confection is developing a taste of yesteryear
drawing on old treats for modern palates.
A second work at Sundae, Sundae draws on
artist Marcia Farquhar’s early life in Felixstowe.
A silent movie stars the artist as one half of ‘the
unknown couple’, with the male half played by
legendary artist and filmmaker Andrew Kötting.
Farquhar’s daughter, artist Kitty Finer, appears as
the artist’s mother, and her granddaughter as the
artist herself. The film is approx 10 minutes long and
can be viewed at any time during opening hours.
Jem Finer
51º 30’ 44” N, 0º 0’ 38” E
Sunday 5 June
13:00–18:00
Sea Cadets’ Hall
Jem Finer is a UK-based artist, musician and
composer. Since studying computer science
in the 1970s, he has worked in a variety of fields,
including photography, film, experimental and
popular music and installation. Recent work
focuses on his interest in long-term sustainability
and the reconfiguring of older technologies.
Responding to an invitation to spend a year
in one place, Jem Finer’s 51º 30’ 44” N, 0º 0’ 38” E
is a sonic exploration from the location of his
studio at Trinity Buoy Wharf. Listening and looking
eastwards, at the point where the rivers Lea and
Thames meet, it draws on field recordings, musical
compositions and films made during all hours of
day and night over the course of 12 months.
Encompassing the cycles of the seasons and
temporal, meteorological and astronomical
shifts, the work is presented as a film in which the
dimension of sound is given priority over the visual.
Join us for a Q&A with Jem Finer in the Sea
Cadets’ Hall at 16:00.
The work is approx 30 minutes long and can
be viewed at any time.
Grasscut & Oliver Coates
Saturday 11 June
Doors open 18:15–21:30
Playhouse Theatre
Grasscut are Brighton based composer/producer
Andrew Phillips and musician/writer Marcus O’Dair.
Grasscut’s music has always been deeply rooted in
a sense of place, expressed through Phillips’ vocals,
and rich references including WG Sebald, Hilaire
Belloc, Ezra Pound, Robert Wyatt (O’Dair published
Different Every Time, the authorised biography
of Wyatt in 2014), James Mason, TS Eliot, Gazelle
Twin, Philip Larkin and Kathleen Ferrier. Grasscut
have received wide praise for their audio-visual
live shows since opening the main stage at the Big
Chill, and their acclaimed recent album Everyone
Was A Bird explored a cinematic and immersive
mix of electronica, post-rock and song augmented
by live strings, drums, piano and guitar.
Oliver Coates is a cellist, composer and producer
based in London. In the past year he has performed
solo shows in China, Russia, Brazil, Egypt, New
York and Australia. He was the winner of the Royal
Philharmonic Society Young Artist Award 2011 and
is an Artist in Residence at the Southbank Centre.
Coates will perform a piece by the twentieth
century German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven.
He says, “Darboven’s Opus 17a consists of 40
minutes of tonal arpeggios moving across the
most resonant regions of the cello. The physical
labour pours into constant patterning. Over time
the viewer / listener becomes aware of detail.
The attack, decay, tempo fluctuations, dynamic
and timbre all come into sharp focus.”
The concert will be three hours long with a short
interval. It will finish in good time for visitors to catch
the last direct train to London St Pancras (21:50),
London Victoria (22:28) or Ramsgate (23:39).
Booking advisable, tickets can be purchased
from the Playhouse Theatre box office, open from
Monday to Saturday 10:00–12:00 (telephone
01227 272042), or via the Playhouse online
booking system (www.playhousewhitstable.co.uk/
booking). Tickets are £8 (£6 concessions). Please
note wheelchair access is limited — contact the
venue for details. The Playhouse Whitstable is
owned and administered by the Lindley Players Ltd.
Leslie Deere, Modern Conjuring for Amateurs, 2016,
photograph Marie Valognes

8 9
Tony Grisoni
Kingsland & In this World
Introduced by Tony Grisoni
Saturday 4 June
21:00–00:00
West Beach tennis courts
With films such as Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
to his name, Tony Grisoni is one of Britain’s leading
screenwriters. His first feature film, Queen of
Hearts, directed by Jon Amiel, won the Grand
Prix at the 1990 Festival du Film de Paris, and
Southcliffe, written for Channel 4 and set on the
North Kent marshes, was widely acknowledged
as a profound, chilling and mesmerising work.
After an introduction by Tony Grisoni, we
will screen Kingsland #1: The Dreamer (BAFTA
nominated), a powerful drama written and
directed by Grisoni, telling the story of a Kurdish
immigrant who has arrived in North East London
with nothing and finds himself involved in a dark
world with fellow Kurds; and In This World
(Berlinale Golden Bear winner), for which Tony
Grisoni made the trek along the people smugglers’
route from the Pakistan/Afghan border, through
Iran and Turkey to Europe with the director,
Michael Winterbottom.
The screenings will be audience powered,
using bicycles to generate the electricity, with
a three-bike cinema set-up from Whitstable’s
Wheely Groovy. Snacks and hot drinks provided.
Booking is essential and places are limited.
Please see Tony Grisoni’s page at
whitstablebiennale.com for more details, or call
01227 281174. Thanks to Wheely Groovy.
Evan Ifekoya
A Score, A Grove, A Phantom:
The Extended Play
Saturday 4 June
20:00–21:00
Sea Cadets’ Hall
Evan Ifekoya is an interdisciplinary artist, exploring
the politicisation of culture, society and aesthetics.
Ifekoya’s current work investigates the possibility
of an erotic and poetic occupation using film,
performative writing and sound, focused on
co-authored, intimate forms of knowledge
production and the radical potential of spectacle.
Ifekoya’s performance will create a multi-
sensory environment of pink fur, Juicy Fruit
chewing gum, a locally sourced ‘disco ball’
and highlights from the artist’s ‘family album’.
The work presents Ifekoya’s research into the
nightclub as archive, the mouth as site of
experience and West African mourning traditions.
A Score, A Groove, A Phantom is a performance
as expanded song, bringing together the public
nature of death and the performance of self, as
well as the awkwardness of having a ‘favourite part’
of Nanna Grace’s funeral DVD. It uses the body
in life and death as a material to investigate the
erotic potential of these experiences. Please
leave your shoes at the door. Libations will be
served. Dancing is encouraged.
The work is approx 60 minutes long and will
finish in good time for visitors to catch the last
direct train to London St Pancras (21:50), London
Victoria (22:28) or Ramsgate (23:39).
Moyra Derby, Nicky Hamlyn, Conor Kelly,
Joan Key and Jost Münster
{} Interval
9–12 June with live install 11 June
11:00–18:00
Whitstable Railway Station waiting room
Framing and spacing are pictorial conventions
that create intervals, often inadvertently forming
part of the dialogue between the viewer and the
work of art. This collaboration between five artists
asks what happens when the cuts of image and
spacing become the focus of attention, when
compositional decisions expand into the space,
activating responses to both imagery and context.
{} Interval reflects on the momentary
encounter, caught within or cut by the limit of
rectangular support, viewfinder, picture space
or film reel. The five artists will work collaboratively
in the space, presenting works to be seen as
componentsandsupportsforeachother,negotiating
how one work frames or cuts across another.
As the collective installation for {} Interval takes
shape, the set-up process will be documented as
part of a live event and played back into the space.
What constitutes the work, how to assess the arena
of influence of one element to another will be
approached as an open question, attention shifting
between image, apparatus, space and medium.
The edits, interruptions and inter-dependencies
between frame and interval, between set-up and
viewpoint become evident, offering a basis for
discussion and comment between artists and
audience.
Mikhail Karikis
Ain’t Got No Fear
4,5 and 11, 12 June
12:00–18:00
Youth Centre
Mikhail Karikis’ practice emerges from his long-
standing investigation of the voice as a material
and a socio-political agent. He collaborates with
communities connected to places of production
to generate site-specific performances to camera
which explore the role sound plays in creating
a sense of collectivity, highlighting alternative
modes of human existence, work and action.
For his new film Mikhail Karikis worked for
almost a year with teenage boys from the Isle of
Grain — a stark and sparsely populated Kentish
marshland dominated by industry, military ruins
and rare wetland birds. Centred around the boys’
performance of a collaboratively composed rap
song, that is also a rackety reclaiming of a local
site where youth raves were recently shut down,
the film presents the immense site as it is defined
by childhood adventure, conjuring up secret
hideaways and creating a form of spatial justice
determined by the logic of play and friendship.
Using as their beat the persistent crushing noises
of the demolition of a neighbouring power plant,
the boys of Grain rap about their lives presenting
glimpses of teenage diaries, spanning their memories
of being younger to their visions of the future.
The work is approx 15 minutes long on a loop.
Visit at any point during opening times. The work
is also being shown in the Biennale cinema on
weekdays, see cinema section for more details.
A co-commission with Ideas Test.
Andrew Kötting
Salon: Atmosphere
Saturday 4 June
16:00–18:00
Cinema
Andrew Kötting’s practice is multifarious, moving
from early live-art inflected, often absurdist
performance pieces, through to experimental
short films, installations, LPs, CDs, paintings,
drawings and books. He has also made feature
films and documentaries that take landscape
and journeys as their inspiration or starting point.
Autobiography, psychogeography and melancholy
are the motors that drive the work.
Kötting has been running ‘salons’ for over
15 years, initially developed with the artist and
filmmaker Barnard, at KIAD (now the University for
the Creative Arts). Early on, students were shown
diverse moving image works to pique curiosity and
provoke debate. The salons grew
in an organic way to include readings, sound
pieces, and the occasional performance. Invariably
the sessions were quite loose and Kötting would
respond to something that Clio presented, almost
as a call and response device.
In the first of the two salons, Kötting will
explore the notion of ‘atmosphere’, and how it
might be experienced in a sonic, visual or textual
way. Materials will be on hand but the structure
will remain loose and improvised.
The salons are a partnership between
University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury and
Whitstable Biennale. Please note: the salons may
include adult material not suitable for under 16s.
Andrew Kötting
Salon: Sound
Saturday 11 June
16:00–18:00
Cinema
In this second salon, Kötting will present work with
Conor Kelly, an artist and musician. There will be
an aural bias to the proceedings but again the
structure will remain loose and the audience will
be invited to watch two men struggling to make
sense of their particular miscellanies.
The salons are a partnership between
University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury and
Whitstable Biennale. Please note: the salons may
include adult material not suitable for under 16s.
Richard Layzell
Softly Softly
4 June, 5 June
14:00–14:40 (16+), 15:30–16:10 (all ages),
17:00–17:40 (16+)
Undisclosed Location
Richard Layzell is an internationally recognised
visual artist working in performance, video,
installation and socially engaged practice.
Softly Softly is an elemental journey exploring
suspension, elasticity, anthropomorphism and
flight. The secret location for this unmissable
experience is in Whitstable and it’s closer than
you think. The underground vacuum may be
unexpected, but not to the neighbours. The
mechanism is fundamental and exhilarating.
During the journey we uncover the universal

11Marcia Farquhar, Rooty Tooty, 2016
in the everyday, the endangered in the familiar,
function and form, expectation and humility,
success and failure, tension and release, pathos
and play.
The work is approx 40 minutes long. Booking
is essential and places are limited. Please see
Richard Layzell’s page at whitstablebiennale.com,
or call 01227 281174 for more details.
Supported by the Gulbenkian.
Tessa Lynch
Green Belt
4 June, 5 June
15:00–16:15
South Quay Boatshed
Tessa Lynch is a Glasgow based visual artist
working predominantly with sculpture and
performance, mimicking objects and scenarios
to reflect the emotional impact of the built
environment.
Green Belt is a live-making performance that
unfolds over the length of time it takes to commute
from Whitstable to London by train. Lynch draws
on the sacred qualities of UK planning law to
create a large-scale floor piece and scripted
spoken word performance. She will use simple
building techniques familiar to the Kent landscape
and, like other worker-commuters, she will also
suffer from interruptions: unscheduled delays,
leaves on the line, PPI sales calls and industrial
action. Green Belt takes place in the South Quay
Boatshed, a stand-in for the post-industrial
buildings in her home district in Glasgow, which
have been repurposed to house enormous sets
for television — places where fact meets fiction.
The Boatshed is in active use in Whitstable’s
working harbour and is also a site earmarked for
development. Lynch will use the transitional nature
of the site to contain her fictional imaginings
about the movement of the female body through
landscape.
The work is approx 75 minutes long. Visit at
any point during opening times.
Louisa Martin
Lossy Ecology
4–12 June
11:00–16:30
Museum
Louisa Martin is a London-based multi-disciplinary
artist interested in the conditions which structure
and produce embodied experience, and how the
possibility of redirecting these conditions might
be exercised. Often the focus is on sensorial,
affective and sub-linguistic modes, via immersive
video installations, or involving the apparatus
of performance and stagecraft.
Lossy Ecology is a new film installation,
produced following research into the neuroscience
of embodiment, and subcultural and scientific
discourses around autism. The film imagines what
might be necessary for the technical formation
of a particular type of body or experiences of
embodiment that cannot be fully articulated
and therefore ‘exist’ within standardised
representational systems.
Reality is positioned as a working fiction
produced by how we necessarily prioritise,
compress or exclude aspects of experience in
order to systemise perceptions into a workable
and communicable consensus. The title refers
to an imagined symbiotic permaculture of realities
which can account for the multitude of differences
in perception and subsequently cognition and
communication across humans, and beyond.
A shape shifting consciousness emerges,
transmutating into different energy formations
as means of producing self-knowledge.
Produced following residencies at CRAE
(Centre for Research into Autism and Education),
UCL, and at the Laboratory of Action and Body,
Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway,
University of London.
The work is approx 10 minutes long on a loop.
Visit at any point during opening times.
Supported by a Wellcome Trust Arts Award.
Lucy Pawlak
Lost Beat Officer
11 June, 12 June
14:00–15:15, 17:00–18:15
Sea Cadets’ Hall
Lucy Pawlak is a visual artist and scriptwriter.
“Every contact leaves a trace”
In this performance/workshop, a beat officer-
turned-artist will inaugurate an independent police
academy that fuses advanced digital forensics
with the situationist practice of détournement.
Participants are invited to model with London Clay
— a material commonly found in South East England
and used for making bricks and pottery — to
materialise missing evidence from disappeared
activity and unexplained events.
This project emerged out of a malfunction in
Dorothy. Dorothy is an interface linking the brain
to a cloud. Her officers are hybrid agents cerebrally
connected to a global archive of big data. When a
Dorothy Officer arrives on a crime scene, the cloud
begins a conversation with the officer’s thoughts,
generating relevant forensic data. Dorothy
collaborates with hybrid agents to create a global
daisy chain of activity relating to any given event.
The work is approx 75 minutes long. No booking
necessary, but places are limited.
Credits: Beat Officer: Charles Adrian Gillott,
My Assistant: Lucy Pawlak, Dorothy: Truth Lab
Technology.
With thanks to staff at Smeed Dean Works,
Ian Martinson and Brickfinder Ltd.
Trish Scott
Medium
4–12 June
Sat–Sun 12:00–18:00,
Mon–Fri 12:00–16:00
Harbour, near Deadman’s Corner
Trish Scott makes videos, performances and events
which explore the production and authorship of
cultural knowledge. With a background in social
anthropology Scott works experimentally with
others, often setting in motion collaborative or
participatory encounters which aim to unsettle
conventional patterns of thought and behaviour.
The resulting artworks create narratives from
the space between these encounters and their
documents.
This new installation explores potentiality within
the creative process. Multiple sound channels
describe an artwork that’s not yet made. Different
voices (which are at once the same) simultaneously
affirm and undermine each other and the form and
medium of the potential work shifts and mutates,
never settling.
Medium stems from conversations between
Scott and a number of psychics, each of whom
Scott asked to predict what she’d produce for
the Biennale. Made in response to having her own
creativity studied by a psychologist, the installation
forms part of broader research examining the
extent to which artistic outcomes can be foretold
and the extent to which it’s possible for one’s
creativity to be articulated by another.
The work is approx 15 minutes long on a loop.
Visit at any point during opening times.
Supported by Canterbury Christ Church
University.

12
Practice Research Forum
STICKY THICK — Thinking through practice
Tuesday 7 June
12:00–19:00
United Reformed Church Hall
Hosted by the School of Music and Fine Art,
University of Kent, and the Sound-Image-Research
Centre (SISRC), this one day symposium will bring
together artists, writers, filmmakers, composers,
actors and researchers across disciplines to
investigate practice research as a continuing
process of invention, and its capacity to generate
dynamic and challenging modes of enquiry.
The event will include presentations by Shona
Illingworth, Adam Chodzko, Gretchen Egolf and
Sinéad Rushe, Tim Meacham, Jan Hendrickse
and others.
The symposium will begin from 11:00–11:45,
meeting for coffee in the Horsebridge Arts Centre
to listen to readings from Rebecca Solnit’s The
Faraway Nearby. Symposium presentations
begin in the United Reform Church Hall from 12:00,
with breaks at intervals to view Biennale exhibits.
The symposium closes with drinks on the beach
at 19:00 before the world premiere of Nichola
Bruce’s new film Gifts.
Free. For more information see http://
stickythick.tumblr.com
Webb-Ellis
Parlor Walls
4–12 June
Monday–Friday 12:00–18:00
Saturday 12:00–17:00
Sunday 12:00–16:00
Library Lecture Room
Webb-Ellis are two British/Canadian artist-
filmmakers working in film, installation and
performance. By enacting various scenarios,
they investigate the problems of representation,
perception and the boundaries between self and
other. Their work often incorporates elements
of fiction and coincidence in order to tell the
story of its own making.
Parlor Walls takes Ray Bradbury’s novel
Fahrenheit 451 as a starting point to explore
alienation in the digital age, and the strangeness
of contemporary human experience. Made up
of documentary, performance and online videos
gleaned over two years, Parlor Walls oscillates
between the mythological and the everyday.
White clowns, YouTube pseudo intimacy, metal
detecting and the atavistic journey of the eel
combine in an experimental inquiry into the real,
loneliness, desire, memory and touch.
Whilst Fahrenheit 451 presents a distinctly
dystopian vision, Parlor Walls harbours a quiet
optimism, calling in the oldest of stories to propose
new ways of understanding our place within an
interconnected world.
The work is approx 20 minutes long on a loop.
Visit at any point during opening times.
Please note this venue is upstairs.
With music by Paul Michael Henry.
With special thanks to Crescent Arts, Stuart
Cameron, University for the Creative Arts, Yorkshire
Coast College and Stephen Joseph Theatre.
Sarah Wood
Boat People
4–12 June
Sat–Sun 12:00–18:00,
Mon–Fri 12:00–16:00
Harbour, near Deadman’s Corner
Sarah Wood is an artist filmmaker. She works
with the found object, particularly the still and
moving image, as an act of reclamation and
re-interrogation.
‘Homelessness is coming to be the destiny
of the world’, suggested Martin Heidegger in 1946,
in the immediate aftermath of the mass movement
of people created by WWII.
In 1946 this displacement was a shocking
legacy. Sixty years on, with the escalating
movement of people escaping conflict and
environmental catastrophe across the world,
has Heidegger’s prediction come true? Has
displacement become the norm rather than
the exception?
Boat People is an essay film that explores
this question. Taking as its starting point the
historic version of Britain as a seafaring nation
the film counterpoints the surety of this assertion
of identity with the contingency of movement.
Boat People also questions the role the moving
image itself plays in the representation of human
movement and the migration of ideas. Just as the
invention of the telescopic lens brought near and
far together for the very first time, Boat People
is about the way in the twenty-first century the
near and far are mediated and transformed by
the new ‘perception accelerator’, the digital image.
The work is approx 20 minutes long on a loop.
Visit at any point during opening times.
Mikhail Karikis, Ain’t Got No Fear, Video still, 2016

15
Sarah Beddington
The Logic of the Birds
(18 mins, 2015)
The Logic of the Birds was inspired by early
twentieth century photographs of Palestinian
processions, showing people moving freely across
the land, as well as by a twelth century Sufi poem
about a group of birds who go in search of a leader
only to realise, after crossing a landscape full of
hardships, that collectively they are the leader
they were searching for. The project began as a
public processional performance with costumed
actors in a remote valley close to the Jordan Valley
— an area that is on a major trajectory for bird
migration as well as being a route inscribed by
infinite journeys of pilgrimage, exile and return.
By working with a mythological story in the reality
of occupied Palestine, the artist hoped to offer
one of many possible scenarios in this controlled
landscape that might open up a space for a
potential future story yet to be created.
Sarah Beddington is a British artist and
filmmaker whose work explores the intersections
between the historical, the imaginary and a
contemporary everyday.Herprojectshavebeen
showninternationally in many museums, galleries
and film festivals and are represented in public and
private art collections including Arts Council England.
Ellie Kyungran Heo
Island
(28 mins / 2015)
This film features an island at the southern-
most point of South Korea, which requires less
than an hour to cover its terrain. On the island,
there are two extremely contrasting atmospheres,
from crowded hordes to hours of emptiness.
These emphasise its position geographically and
psychologically as an island. In a filmic relationship,
gazing at some residents on the island, the questions
“Where are you now?”, “Why are you here?” and
“What happened to you?” would be asked to the
film’s subjects, audience, and the director herself.
Ellie Kyungran Heo is an artist-filmmaker,
graduating in 2015 from an MA in Moving
Image at the Royal College of Art. She makes
experimental films by collaging the performance
and documentation of her subject as her
relationship to the subject changes over time
with respect to conflict, intimacy and sensitivity.
ARTISTS’
SHORT FILM
PROGRAMME
H4, Horsebridge Arts Centre
This programme of short films runs
three times every day during the
festival. The programme starts at
10:00, 12:40 and 15:20. Visit at any
point during opening times. Free.
Jessica Sarah Rinland
The Blind Labourer
(27 mins / 2016)
The Blind Labourer examines the similarities and
contrasts within the whaling and lumber industries.
It edits together archive footage of labourers in the
forests, at sea and in factories, felling trees, cutting
whales and developing their multiple products for
society and scientific studies. Text appears as
subtitles throughout the film, written in the first
person by an ambiguous whaler who comes to
meet a blind lumberjack, fascinated by whales.
The film rejects the idea that beings can be ranked
according to their relative value, and explores
each micro and macro form’s effect on one other.
Jessica Sarah Rinland has exhibited in galleries,
cinemas,filmfestivalsanduniversitiesinternationally.
With Philip Hoare and Edward Sugden, she is
currently working on We Account The Whale
Immortal which explores historic and recurrent links
between cetaceans and Utopia — to be exhibited
at Somerset House, July–September 2016.
Becca Voelcker
Island
(28 mins / 2015)
Island traces the rhythms and routines of everyday
life on a sub-tropical island thousands of miles
southwest of mainland Japan. Setting out from
this island, the film tracks ways in which diverse
political agendas lie like sediment, and affect the
bedrock of a place in terms of identity and language.
While there might be shorelines on islands and
borders on maps, it is through transgressions of
these thresholds that each place revives its sense
of self, time and again. In this way, Island concerns
sense of place on a larger scale, inviting viewers
to consider their own senses of place, and why it is
that places carry such cargoes of memory, trauma,
promise, and honour. Island was made during one
summer, while Voelcker was living with a family on
the island and participating in community events.
Becca Voelcker is a Harvard University PhD
candidate, exploring how moving images made
between artistic and ethnographic practices
communicate senses of place and displacement.
Raised bilingually in rural Wales, she then studied
at Goldsmiths, University of London, and The
University of Cambridge, before living in Tokyo
between 2013–2015.

16 17
Xiaowen Zhu
Oriental Silk
(30 mins, 2016)
Oriental Silk explores the worldview of the owner
of the first silk importing company in Los Angeles.
Carefully and quietly, the film observes this owner,
Kenneth Wong, as he goes through his daily
routine in the store and tells his story: how his
parents, first-dream through the store; how the
once legendary store’s fortunes rose in close
connection with the Hollywood entertainment
industry, then fell with the proliferation of cheaper
silk in the new global economy; how he himself
came to be the owner of the shop and caretaker
of the family legacy; and about his deep feelings
for the shop, its history, and its future.
Xiaowen Zhu is a London-based documentary
filmmaker, media artist and writer. Her work has
been widely shown internationally including at
ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Art
Basel, Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts and Athens
Video Art Festival.
Simon Barker and Jason Wood
Always (crashing)
(14 mins / 2016)
A Saab 900 makes a meandering journey through
the spaces of a multi storey car park. It isn’t clear
if the car park is abandoned, simply underused,
or standing-in for something else altogether.
The suggestion is of a parallel heterotopia where
things are different in barely noticeable and
unexplained ways.The film avoids any clear
narrative, instead simply extending an invitation
to enjoy the apparently aimless motion of the
car through the non-places of the building. The
intertitle quotes come from J G Ballard’s short
story Report from an Unidentified Space Station
and imply the possibility that the car is on a
journey of exploration, and in a way it is:
measuring out space in its rhythmic movements.
Simon Barker is an architect, filmmaker and
artist, who trained at the Bartlett, UCL. Jason Wood
is the Artistic Director of Film at HOME, Manchester.
He has also written widely on cinema. His most recent
publication is The Faber Book of New British Cinema.
Jacob Cartwright & Nick Jordan
Off the Trail
(10 mins, 2015)
Walk the path, sit the rains, grind the ink, wet the
brush, unroll the broad white space… Lead out
and tip the moist, black line.
Gary Snyder’s invocation to the muse of a
Chinese scroll painter sets the tone in a short film
adapted from the artists’ longer work, Headlands
Lookout. Filmed in former US military barracks,
and in the long-abandoned homes and circular
library of Gary Snyder and Zen philosopher Alan
Watts, Off the Trail follows a central protagonist,
a soldier from another era, as he performs a series
of actions and rituals. The uniformed figure paints
Chinese nature symbols, chants, meditates and
wanders dreamlike through a rolling Californian
landscape of fog-shrouded hills, coastal defences
and dense woodland valleys. Scenes are
accompanied by haiku and poetry readings
from Michael McClure and Gary Snyder, and
the disembodied voice of Alan Watts, ruminating
upon the passage of time and our perception of
the ‘wild’.
Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan are visual
artists and filmmakers based in Manchester. They
have been collaborating since 2003. Their work
has been exhibited internationally. Their practice
is cross-disciplinary, encompassing video, drawing,
painting, photography, found objects, publications
and events, and often explores the relationship
between the natural world and cultural history.
Becca Voelcker, Island, video still, © the artist 2015

19
A Cat in Paris
Jean-Loup Felicioli & Alain Gagnol
(PG, 2010, France/Belgium, 70 mins)
Saturday 4 June
11:30
For details see Family section.
Counting
Jem Cohen
(PG, 2015, USA, 111 mins)
Saturday 4 June
13:00
Brooklyn-based Jem Cohen is perhaps the
most important diary / essay / street filmmaker
currently working. For more than three decades
he has been documenting and celebrating the lives
of the marginalised and the overlooked in moving,
committed and always resistant works that speak
with the fragile poetry of everyday epiphany.
Following his internationally acclaimed Museum
Hours, his most recent feature is a dispatch from
across the globe.
In fifteen linked chapters shot in locations
ranging from Moscow to New York to Istanbul,
Counting merges city symphony, diary film, and
personal/political essay to create a vivid portrait
of contemporary life. Perhaps the most personal
of Cohen’s films (Museum Hours, Chain, Instrument,
Benjamin Smoke), Counting measures street life,
light and time, noting not only surveillance and
overdevelopment but resistance and its phantoms
as manifested in music, animals and everyday
magic. (Cinema Guild).
Calais: the Last Border
Marc Isaacs
(12A, 2003, UK, 59 mins)
Saturday 4 June
19:00
Quietly building a body of work that is putting
him among the most empathetic documentary
observers we have of lives often overlooked,
Isaacs here visits the port that had become by
2003 both an index of global economic and social
realities and a new border in ways previously
unimagined. He weaves portraits of various
individuals — a young English bar owner, an elderly
British couple facing hard times economically and
Ijez, an Afghan asylum seeker who lost all his family
in the bombing of Kabul and now finds himself
sleeping rough after the demolition of Sangatte,
the Red Cross holding camp at Calais — into a
moving and melancholy overview of a port defined
more than ever by the island it gazes at across the
Channel. Anticipation and disquiet colour all these
lives, and Isaacs is most skilled at never judging by
appearances, teasing out the pains and occasional
pleasures beneath the most daily of surfaces.
Tales of the Night
Michel Ocelot
(PG, 2011, France, 84 mins)
Sunday 5 June
11:00
For details see Family section.
Concurrence
Doffy Weir & Dave Draper
(NC, 2016, UK, 45 mins)
Sunday 5 June
13:00
World Premiere
Concurrence makes a slow 45 mile filmic and
actual walk from Greenwich to All Hallows on the
Hoo Peninsula in Kent. Edited from hundreds of
photographs taken over three years, accelerating
regeneration and industrial dereliction cohabit
with contemporary power conduits and ancient
transport routes. Modern contrasts with the older;
the crowded city with tranquil open spaces, little
known and ever-changing landscapes that are
both urban and rural, yet neither of these. The
film is accompanied by a haunting soundtrack of
field recordings, found sound and original music
(computer manipulated guitar improvisations).
Concurrence is a companion piece to Confluence
(2014). The two photographic essays contrast
and document the beauty and evolution of the
two sides of the Thames Estuary.
Doffy Weir, a photographer living in East
London, wants to slow down the madness and take
time to look longer and see more. Dave Draper is a
musician and composer, also living in East London.
The Ghost Frequency
Chiara Ambrosio
(NC, 2014, UK / Italy, 72 mins)
Sunday 5 June
15:00
A haunting artists’ documentary exploring the
half-populated, half-ruined village of Verbicaro
in Calabria, southern Italy, scored by Bird Radio,
BIENNALE
CINEMA
Visit the Biennale cinema, designed
by architects Manalo & White, at
the Horsebridge Arts Centre for the
duration of the festival, with films
screened every day.
Film Passes for the cinema are
£15 (£10 concessions) for the whole
festival, or £4 for a single film
(£3 concessions). The weekend
morning family films are free.

20 21
The Ghost Frequency (La Frequenza Fantasma)
tells the story of a place suspended in time and
space, where the memory of a mythical past and
the present are inextricably intertwined. It is an
investigation into the nature of collective and
personal history, into the origin and preservation of
memory. It is the story of the relationship between
animate and inanimate matter, and of how this
relationship turns into the motor and purpose of
existence — a search for the sacred patterns of
the quotidian within the rhythms of nature.
What Means Something
Ben Rivers
(NC, 2015, UK, 66 mins)
Sunday 5 June
20:00
What Means Something is a portrait of the painter
Rose Wylie. Artist filmmaker Ben Rivers met Wylie
a few years ago and the film is a meeting between
two friends. Rivers writes “Much like when Rose
begins a painting, making a filmic portrait is an
open engagement; the exact form will reveal itself
in the making. I began by visiting Rose repeatedly
at her house in Kent, filming her in her studio,
house and garden. The film grew from modest
beginnings and became much longer than intended,
mainly because I wanted to keep returning to see
Rose. She gave me complete access to filming her
painting — so there are long sequences simply
watching this process, alongside more relaxed
times reading, looking at sketchbooks, talking
about painting and other things, looking at source
material and sitting in her jungle-like garden.”
Ain’t Got No Fear
Mikhail Karikis
(2016, UK, approx 15 mins)
Monday 6 June
13:30
Mikhail Karikis’ practice emerges from his
long-standing investigation of the voice as
a material and a socio-political agent. He
collaborates with communities connected to
places of production to generate site-specific
performances to camera which explore the role
sound plays in creating a sense of collectivity,
highlighting alternative modes of human existence,
work and action.
For his new film Mikhail Karikis worked for
almost a year with teenage boys from the Isle
of Grain — a stark and sparsely populated Kentish
marshland dominated by industry, military ruins
and rare wetland birds. Centred around the boys’
performance of a collaboratively composed rap
song, that is also a rackety reclaiming of a local
site where youth raves were recently shut down,
the film presents the immense site as it is defined
by childhood adventure, conjuring up secret
hideaways and creating a form of spatial justice
determined by the logic of play and friendship.
Using as their beat the persistent crushing noises
of the demolition of a neighbouring power plant,
the boys of Grain rap about their lives presenting
glimpses of teenage diaries, spanning their memories
of being younger to their visions of the future.
Dummy Jim
Matt Hulse
(PG, 2013, UK, 87 mins)
Monday 6 June
15:00
Hulse worked for twelve years on this visual mix of
documentary and fiction. A treat for the eyes and
ears. Over fifty years ago, the deaf James Duthie
(Dummy Jim) biked from his Scottish fishing village
to the Arctic Circle and back again. When he got
back home, he wrote down his experiences in
the book I Cycled into the Arctic Circle, which
he published himself. Years later, the mother of
director Matt Hulse found this rarity and sent it
to her son, who decided to film the eccentric story.
Together with deaf actor and filmmaker Samuel
Dore, Hulse set out on the long journey through
northern Europe. Hulse mixed fictional and
documentary elements into a virtuoso blend:
unusual people in fictional Super 8 films, playful
animated sequences and archive footage of the
era in the countries traversed. Back to the present,
where the community gives the local hero a
memorial and a gravestone. Hulse follows events
closely, sketching a fascinating portrait of this
small fishing community in the twenty-first century.
Piercing Brightness
Shezad Dawood
(15, 2013, UK, 72 mins)
Monday 6 June
17:30
Commissioned by In Certain Places, a public art
project in Preston, this alien intelligence story by
the acclaimed artist is in fact the result of several
years of visits and interviews with local residents
and organisations. As it happens, Preston has the
highest rate of UFO sightings in England, was an
early site of the Mormon Church in Europe, and
has the fastest-growing Chinese population in the
country. The film, which follows two extraterrestrials
who land in Preston to round up the ‘Glorious 100’
they sent to Earth generations ago to observe our
planet, concerns itself as much with otherness as
with the otherworldly. Dawood used locals as
extras and shot in abandoned and little-known
parts of the town, casting Preston as a maker in
its own uncanny portrait.
Watermark
Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky
(PG, 2013, Canada, 92 mins)
Monday 6 June
19:30
Watermark is a feature documentary from
multiple-award winning filmmakers Jennifer
Baichwal and Nick de Pencier, and renowned
photographer Edward Burtynsky, marking
their second collaboration after Manufactured
Landscapes in 2006. The film brings together
diverse stories from around the globe about
our relationship with water: how we are drawn
to it, what we learn from it, how we use it and the
consequences of that use. Shot in stunning 5K
ultra high-definition video and full of soaring
aerial perspectives, this film shows water as a
terraforming element, as well as the magnitude
of our need and use. In Watermark, the viewer is
immersed in a magnificent force of nature that
we all too often take for granted — until it’s gone.
Ain’t Got No Fear
Mikhail Karikis
(2016, UK, approx 15 mins)
Tuesday 7 June
13:30
This is a repeat. See entry on Monday 6 June
for details.
I Could Read the Sky
Nichola Bruce
(15, 1999, UK, 86 mins)
Tuesday 7 June
15:00
A film about music, madness memory, love and
loss, and a haunting story of immigration, I Could
Read the Sky is adapted from the photographic
novel of the same name. It is the moving story of
an old man living in a bedsit in London, remembering
his life growing up on the west coast of Ireland, and
his journey to London. The film unravels the strange
twisting drama of a working man’s life. It moves
from a decaying rural past to a vividly modern
present, driven by a dynamic music soundtrack
that draws from both, and a simple flowing lyrical
storytelling. The film gets to the essence of how
we remember, from behind closed eyes, with its
abstractions of light and form and sudden moments
of precise clarity, taking us on an inward, visually
extraordinary labyrinthine journey to the film’s end.
It stars the acclaimed late Irish writer Dermot Healy.
Gifts
Nichola Bruce
(NC, 2016, UK, 70 mins)
Special preview
Tuesday 7 June
20:00
Gifts, a ten year project (2005–2015) was made
with the gift economy (i.e. no exchange of money)
by artist Clare Whistler about eight gifts that were
traditionally given to a new child — Egg for Life,
Coal for Heat, Evergreen for Eternity, Salt for
Health, Candle for Light, Bread for Food, Coin for
Wealth and a Silver Ring for Love throughout Life.
Made in collaboration with other artists, these
‘gifts’ were offered and received in intimate, invited
events in unusual locations. Nichola Bruce has
interpreted the film footage of the eight events
shot over the years by different filmmakers. The
weather, gestures, places and the participants
combine in a strange series of journeys unearthing
what these objects, offered as a gift, may hold.
Clare Whistler has also created a book, Gifts, a
record of the Gift Project alongside essays about
gifts, ritual, utopian ideals and the gift economy.
The film was financed by Arts Council England and
Hastings Borough Council.
Following the screening there will be a Q&A
with Nichola Bruce and Clare Whistler.
Clare Whistler makes work across all art forms.
With a background in movement and work in opera
and performance she responds, interprets and
collaborates with people, places and the elemental.
Nichola Bruce works with moving image.

22
Ain’t Got No Fear
Mikhail Karikis
(2016, UK, approx 15 mins)
Wednesday 8 June
13:30
This is a repeat. See entry on Monday 6 June
for details.
Watermark
Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky (
PG 2013, Canada, 92 mins).
Wednesday 8 June
15:00
This is a repeat. See entry on Monday 6 June
for details.
Stories in the Dark screenings
Wednesday 8 June
18:30
Selected by Ben Judd. A selection of works to
accompany the exhibition Stories in the Dark,
curated by Judd, at the Beaney House of Art
and Knowledge in Canterbury (until 19 June).
The exhibition invited artists to respond to the
magic lantern, the projection device invented
in the seventeenth century which is often seen
as a precursor to the cinema. Unlike the
pre-recorded nature of cinema, with the magic
lantern the creative act takes place live with the
audience, encouraging a sense of participation.
This one-off screening extends these concerns
by staging historical and contemporary artworks
involving projection, all of which engage the artist
and/or audience in a performative act.
Guy Sherwin presents Hand/Shutter (2016),
combining analogue and digital technologies in
live performance, thereby reflecting on two ages
of technology and two ages of the artist/performer.
Tony Hill performs Point Source (1973–2016);
a small bright light is the projector, several objects
are the film and the whole room is the screen.
Sally Golding’s Data Slide (2016) is a live set
relating to the magic lantern in which she
considers the act of performance — conjuring
and tricks of perception. In Anthony McCall’s Line
Describing a Cone (1973) the conventional primacy
of the screen is completely abandoned in favour of
the primacy of the projection event; a screen is not
even mandatory.
All This Can Happen
Siobhan Davies & David Hinton
(NC, 2012, UK, 48 mins)
Wednesday 8 June
20:00
All This Can Happen is constructed entirely from
archive photographs and footage from the earliest
days of cinema. Based on Robert Walser’s novella
The Walk (1917), the film follows the footsteps of
the protagonist as series of small adventures
and chance encounters take the walker from
idiosyncratic observations of ordinary events
towards a deeper pondering on the comedy,
heartbreak and ceaseless variety of life. A
flickering dance of intriguing imagery brings
to light the possibilities of ordinary movements
from the everyday which appear, evolve and
freeze before your eyes. Juxtapositions, different
speeds and split frame techniques convey the
walker’s state of mind as he encounters a world
of hilarity, despair and ceaseless variety.
Following the 20:00 screening there will be
a Q&A with Siobhan Davies.
Siobhan Davies is one of the most innovative,
and imaginatively expansive choreographers at
work today. In the words of Sanjoy Roy, “Siobhan
Davies believes in dance. She believes that it is
an art in its own right, one that is as articulate,
expressive and as productive as music, or
drama, or visual art. She believes that it can be
as intellectual as it is sensual, that it can be both
technical and emotional, metaphorical as well
as immediate.”
Ain’t Got No Fear
Mikhail Karikis
(2016, UK, approx 15 mins)
Thursday 9 June
13:30
This is a repeat. See entry on Monday 6 June
for details.
All This Can Happen
Siobhan Davies and David Hinton
(NC, 2012, UK, 48 mins)
Thursday 9 June
15:00
This is a repeat. See entry on Wednesday 8 June
for details.
Ben Rivers, What Means Something, film still, 2015,

24 25
Dummy Jim
Matt Hulse
(PG, 2013, UK, 87 mins)
Thursday 9 June
20:00
Hulse worked for twelve years on this visual mix of
documentary and fiction. A treat for the eyes and
ears. Over fifty years ago, the deaf James Duthie
(Dummy Jim) biked from his Scottish fishing village
to the Arctic Circle and back again. When he got
back home, he wrote down his experiences in the
book I Cycled into the Arctic Circle, which he
published himself. Years later, the mother of
director Matt Hulse found this rarity and sent it
to her son, who decided to film the eccentric story.
Together with deaf actor and filmmaker Samuel
Dore, Hulse set out on the long journey through
northern Europe. Hulse mixed fictional and
documentary elements into a virtuoso blend:
unusual people in fictional Super 8 films, playful
animated sequences and archive footage of the
era in the countries traversed. Back to the present,
where the community gives the local hero a
memorial and a gravestone. Hulse follows events
closely, sketching a fascinating portrait of this small
fishing community in the twenty-first century.
Ain’t Got No Fear
Mikhail Karikis
(2016, UK, approx 15 mins)
Friday 10 June 13:30
This is a repeat. See entry on Monday 6 June for
details.
Taskafa (Stories of the Street)
Andrea Luka Zimmerman
(PG, 2013, UK / Turkey, 66 mins)
Friday 10 June
15:00
Taskafa is an artist’s essay film, voiced by John
Berger, about memory and the most necessary
forms of belonging, both to a place and to history,
through a search for the role played in the city by
Istanbul’s street dogs and their relationship to its
human populations. Through this exploration, the
film opens a window on the contested relationship
between power and the public, community and
categorisation (in location and identity), and the
ongoing struggle / resistance against a single
way of seeing and being. Despite several major
attempts by Istanbul’s rulers, politicians and
planners over the last four hundred years to erase
them, the city’s street dogs have persisted thanks
to an enduring alliance with widespread civilian
communities, which recognise and defend their
right to co-exist.
Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a filmmaker, artist
and educator. Andrea grew up in the largest
council estate in Munich and left school at sixteen
to become a hairdresser. After coming to London
in 1991, she went to Central St. Martins College of
Art. She won the 2014 Artangel Open award for her
collaborative project Cycle (2017) with Adrian
Jackson (of Cardboard Citizens).
Estate, a Reverie
Andrea Luka Zimmerman
(12A, 2015, UK, 83 mins)
Friday 10 June
19:30
“Andrea Zimmerman’s extraordinary film, which
documents the last days of a Hackney housing
estate, is both profound and original. Having
herself lived on the estate for many years,
her tender portrait exhibits deep feelings of
community and solidarity — sentiments almost
entirely missing from our contemporary political
vocabulary. She has given Hackney back, at last,
some of its wayward heart.” — Ken Worpole
Filmed over seven years, Estate, a Reverie
reveals and celebrates the resilience of residents
who are profoundly overlooked by media
representations and wider social responses.
Interweaving intimate portraits with the residents’
own historical re-enactments, landscape and
architectural studies and dramatised scenes,
Estate, a Reverie asks how we might resist being
framed exclusively through class, gender, ability
or disability, and even through geography...
Following the screening there will be a Q&A with
Andrea Luka Zimmerman.
Zarafa
Rémi Bezançon, Jean-Christophe Lie (PG)
(2012, France / Belgium, 78 mins)
Saturday 11 June
09:00
For details see Family section.
Concurrence
Doffy Weir and Dave Draper
(NC, 2016, 45 mins)
World Premiere
Saturday 11 June
13:00
This is a repeat. See entry on Saturday 5th
June for details.
Asylum
Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair
(NC, 2000, UK, 58 mins)
Saturday 11 June
19:30
With this work, Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair have
taken television to the next level... it will either
have viewers hammering at their sets and
wondering if there’s an electrical storm in their
neighbourhood, or scratching their heads at the
labyrinthine pseudo-sci-fi narrative. Describing
itself as a film about exile, memory, madness,
Asylum is the third collaboration between the
British filmmaker-writer Chris Petit and the
novelist, essayist and poet Iain Sinclair. Continuing
their exploration of marginalised cultural figures,
the duo has extended the distressed, multi-media
textures of their previous collaboration, The
Falconer (1998), to create a piece that, while
conceived for British TV, pushes at the limits of
what television currently deems to be aesthetically
acceptable. Not for nothing does the film carry
the subtitle The Final Commission. (Chris Darke).
Seafarers
Jason Massot
(NC, 2004, UK, 78 mins)
Saturday 11 June
21:00
For then first-timer Jason Massot, the impulse
to make this poignant feature-length examination
on the solitary, transient lives of merchant seamen
was a desire to examine male solitude and transience.
His self-funded DV documentary follows four
seamen (a Swede, a Croat, a Polynesian and a
Nigerian) as they wait in Rotterdam, the world’s
largest port, to return to the sea. While each finds
himself there for a different reason, all share a
world and profession that exerts enormous
emotional, relational and economic pressures
on them. On the cutting edge of globalisation,
with their wages forever in danger of being slashed,
they exist in a limbo of often deep loss, be it of
home, family, female contact, or even identity.
Massot watches quietly as they wait to move on,
building the film distinctively from the ‘downtime’
rhythms of the mariners’ days and circling
thoughts. It’s effectively accompanied by the
guitar of Will Oldham, his ambient acoustic score
giving a melancholy music to the echoing halls
and empty reaches of the docks and ‘placeless’
industrial zones.
Le Petit Nicolas
Laurent Tirard
(PG, 2009, Belgium / France, 91 mins)
Sunday 12 June
09:00
For details see Family section.
What Means Something
Ben Rivers
(NC, 2015, UK, 66 mins)
Sunday 12 June
14:00
This is a repeat. See entry on Sunday 5 June,
20:00 for details.
Unseen: the Lives of Looking
Dryden Goodwin
(NC, 2015, UK, 90 mins)
Sunday 12 June
20:00
Unseen focuses on four individuals who have
extraordinary relationships to looking, mixing
Goodwin’s closely observed drawings with
live-action and an intricate soundtrack. Featuring
an eye surgeon, a NASA planetary explorer, a
human rights lawyer and Goodwin himself, the
film presents a variety of perspectives, ranging
from the minute details of surgery to panoramic
expanses of space. It considers the physical act
of looking, the tools we use to perceive the world
around us and how these relate to our identities.
“A film that channels a powerful sense of humanity.
Enigmatic, sumptuously produced portraits that
feel truer and more revealing than a biographical
tome”, Apollo Magazine. Unseen, The Lives of
Looking was supported by an Arts Award from
the Wellcome Trust, alongside funding from Royal
Museums Greenwich, Arts Council England and
Red Bee Media.

27
Rebecca Solnit
The Faraway Nearby: A Complete Reading
4–12 June
Starting at 10:00 every day for approx one
hour except Thur and Fri starts at 11:00
The Long Table café, ground floor
Horsebridge Arts Centre
The wondrous book by one of contemporary
non-fiction’s finest exponents takes its title from
the correspondence sign-off by artist Georgia
O’Keefe. Both now give us our festival theme. Join
us daily for an hour as we read the whole volume
out loud in a spirit of sharing and community.
“Gifts come in many guises. One summer,
Rebecca Solnit was bequeathed three boxes of
ripening apricots, which lay, mountainous, on her
bedroom floor — a windfall, a riddle, an emergency
to be dealt with. The fruit came from a neglected
tree that her mother, gradually succumbing to
memory loss, could no longer tend to. From this
unexpected inheritance came stories spun like
those of Scheherazade, who used her gifts as a
storyteller to change her fate and her listener’s
heart. As she looks back on the year of apricots
and emergencies, Solnit weaves her own story
into fairytales and the lives of others — the
Marquis de Sade, Mary Shelley and Ernesto ‘Che’
Guevara. She tells of unexpected invitations and
adventures, from a library of water in Iceland to
the depths of the Grand Canyon. She tells of
doctors and explorers, monsters and moths.
She tells of warmth and coldness, of making art
and re-making the self.” (from Granta Publishers).
Rebecca Solnit is author of, among many other
books, Wanderlust, A Field Guide to Getting Lost,
the award-winning River of Shadows and A
Paradise Built In Hell. A contributing editor to
Harper’s, she writes regularly for the London
Review of Books and the Los Angeles Times.
She lives in San Francisco.
Free. Sign up in advance to read, by going
to the Rebecca Solnit The Faraway Nearby
page on our website, or email
rachel@whitstablebiennale.com
Alice Butler
Sunday 5 June, 17:00–18:00
The Long Table café, ground floor
Horsebridge Arts Centre
Alice Butler will give readings from the Fan Letters
of Love chapbooks. Copies of the booklets will be
available. Free.
In conversation
Rose Wylie and Skye Sherwin
Sunday 5 June
18:00–19:00
Biennale cinema, Horsebridge Arts Centre
Acclaimed painter Rose Wylie takes a keen
interest in cinema, and references from film
spill into her work. In this ‘in conversation’, Wylie
talks to art writer and Guardian critic Skye Sherwin
about painting, film, and being the subject of
artist filmmaker Ben Rivers’ film portrait, What
Means Something.
Booking essential, please see the Rose Wylie
and Skye Sherwin page on our website for
more details or call 01227 281174. Tickets £5
(£4 concessions). Following the talk, there will be
a screening of Ben Rivers’ What Means Something,
see Biennale cinema listings for more details.
The Faraway
Nearby Pub Quiz
Sunday 5 June
19:00–20:30
The New Inn pub
Artist Sadie Hennessy hosts the Whitstable Biennale
Quiz. Be assured that good general knowledge,
facts about current affairs and an encyclopaedic
insight into sporting fixtures won’t help you one
little bit with this, the Faraway Nearby Quiz!
Hennessy is a Whitstable-based artist with
an MA in Fine Art from Central St. Martins. Her
work aims to scratch away the veneer of everyday
normality to find the darkness underneath. She
is particularly known for her Suicide Bridges.
Her Satellite project for the last Biennale was
My First Tattoo, a tattoo parlour for children,
which caused a media stir in Britain and abroad.
Free entry (buy your own drinks!). Space is
limited so arrive early.
Rosa Ainley and Stephen Beasley
Answers on a postcard please
Wednesday 8 June
15:00–16:00
The Long Table café, ground floor
Horsebridge Arts Centre
Answers on a postcard is a new work by Whitstable
writer Rosa Ainley that launches a period of
thinking about cultural space in Whitstable.
Join Rosa Ainley and Stephen Beasley from
Manalo & White architects, who will talk about
TALKS,
READINGS AND
CONVERSATIONS

28 29
architecture and spaces, how architects and writers
can work with users of buildings and ways of
getting people talking about how we use buildings.
Rosa Ainley is a writer and text-based artist
with a background in architecture and photography.
Her published work ranges from the short story
to non/fiction to journalism and includes edited
collections, guide books and spoken word sound
installations. Manalo & White (M&W) are a studio
of architects with a reputation for delivering
imaginative solutions, with experience of working
closely with arts organisations to transform
existing buildings, including Focal Point Gallery
in Southend.
Free.
Book Club of Book Clubs
Wednesday 8 June
18:00–20:00
The Long Table café, ground floor
Horsebridge Arts Centre
Calling all local book clubs! (And those of you
thinking of joining one.) A special Whitstable
Biennale event to discuss the book that inspired
this year’s festival title, The Faraway Nearby by
celebrated American writer, historian and activist
Rebecca Solnit. This poignant book looks at how
we construct stories, and are in turn constructed
by stories, through her personal accounts of death,
illness and travel.
Free, booking advised or turn up on the day
(limited places), see the Book Club of Book Clubs
page on our website for more details or call
01227 281174. In partnership with Whitlit.
In Conversation
Olivia Laing & Brian Dillon
Thursday 9 June
18:00–19:30
Cinema
Two acclaimed non-fiction writers (and art critics)
Olivia Laing and Brian Dillon discuss their latest
books, both of which resonate with the Biennale’s
title The Faraway Nearby. Laing’s The Lonely City:
Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (Canongate)
finds an unexpected connection between
loneliness and art, drawing on a difficult episode
living in New York; while Kent-based Dillon’s The
Great Explosion: Gunpowder, the Great War, and
a Disaster on the Kent Marshes (Penguin Books)
is a highly personal study of a traumatic, but now
mostly forgotten event, that took place in the
remote and enigmatic marshlands near Faversham.
Free but booking advisable. See the Olivia
Laing and Brian Dillon page on our website for
more details or call 01227 281174.
Afternoon tea with curators and artists
Friday 10 June
16:00–17:00
The Long Table café, ground floor
Horsebridge Arts Centre
Meet the artists and curators. Join us for an
informal conversation between Biennale curators
and artists over afternoon tea at the Biennale’s
own pop-up café.
Free. Complimentary afternoon tea and cake
will be served.
Mean, Mode, Medium
Trish Scott & Ian Hocking
Friday 10 June
17:00–18:00
Cinema
Trish Scott makes videos, performances and events
which explore the production and authorship of
cultural knowledge. Ian Hocking is a Senior Lecturer
in Psychology, where he researches creativity. His
work has been published in peer-reviewed journals
and presented at conferences in Europe and the
United States. Additionally, he has maintained
a parallel career as a writer of fiction. His debut
novel, Deja Vu, was awarded the Red Adept Award
for Science Fiction in 2011.
In July 2015 Scott agreed to become research
subject for Dr Ian Hocking and have her creativity
studied as she developed an artwork for the
Biennale.
In this performance lecture Scott and Hocking
use the statistical method of sampling to share the
story of their collaboration: a story of an artist and
scientist locked in a process of mutual observation;
each looking to test and articulate the reality of
the other as an artwork takes shape.
In a creative journey engaging with psychology,
sci-fi and psychics the audience present on the
day will shape the narrative course of the talk.
Free. Supported by Canterbury Christ Church
University.
Jeremy Brooker and Richard Navarro, Lamplighters, 2016,
photograph Matthew de Pulford at Stories in the Dark,
curated by Ben Judd

31
David Seabrook Reading
All the Devils Are Here A Celebration and
Reading of the Entire Work
Saturday 11 June
11:00 until we finish reading the book,
approx 19:00
Whitstable Museum Courtyard
Join writer Iain Sinclair, poet Simon Smith and
filmmaker Paul Tickell in a celebration of the life
and work of Kent writer David Seabrook, and a
day-long, continuous shared reading of his
singular study of the county.
In his distinctive 2002 work, the late David
Seabrook (1960–2009) takes the reader on a
deranged exploration of the coast towns of Thanet
and the Medway. “Seabrook lives in the county;
from the autobiographical glimpses he provides,
he seems to have done so all his life. However, his
book is only fleetingly interested in modern Kent,
that bruised thumb of land with its asylum-seekers
and troubled resorts. His contemporary descriptions
are spare and vivid — a seafront bench is painted
‘ketchup red’ — but they are mainly context for a
deeper project. Seabrook takes four famously
unsettling works of literature — The Waste Land
by TS Eliot, The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Dickens,
Robin Maugham’s The Servant and John Buchan’s
The Thirty-Nine Steps — and attempts to expose
their origins in real Kentish places and past events.”
(Andy Beckett, from The Guardian).
Free to attend — come at any point during the
day to listen. Sign up in advance to read — go to
the David Seabrook Reading page on our website,
or email rachel@whitstablebiennale.com — there
will also be a limited number of slots available if
you just turn up on the day.
On the Edge
Ali Smith and Sarah Wood
Saturday 11 June
14:00–15:30
Playhouse Theatre
Sarah Wood is an artist filmmaker. She works with
the found object, particularly the still and moving
image, as an act of reclamation and re-interrogation.
AliSmith(CBE)isaScottishwriterbasedinCambridge.
She is the author of seven novels, two plays and
several collections of short stories. In 2013 she
collaborated with her partner Sarah Wood on
Shire, an illustrated collection of short stories.
Her novel How to be Both (2014) was awarded
the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel award.
Here we are in Whitstable, on the edge of
England, on the edge of Europe. What does
being on the edge mean? What are the creative
possibilities of the precarious and the liminal?
In a dialogue focusing on all the things that edge
can mean, and a discussion of their recent projects,
the artful Ali Smith and the filmic Sarah Wood
conjure the possibilities.
Booking advisable, tickets can be purchased
from the Playhouse Theatre box office, open from
Monday to Saturday 10:00–12:00 (telephone
01227 272042), or via the Playhouse online
booking system (www.playhousewhitstable.co.uk/
booking). Tickets £8 (£6 concessions). Please
note wheelchair access is limited — contact the
venue for details. The Playhouse Whitstable is
owned and administered by the Lindley Players Ltd.
Philip Hoare
The Sea Inside
In presentation and conversation
Sunday 12 June
16:00–17:00
Cinema
Philip Hoare is one of the UK’s greatest writers of
creativenon-fictionandperhapsourmostpassionate
advocate of marine ecology and culture, especially
regarding the cetacaean (whales). His most recent
book is The Sea Inside: “The sea surrounds us. It
gives us life, provides us with the air we breathe
and the food we eat. It is where we came from, and
it carries our commerce. It represents home and
migration, ceaseless change and constant presence.
It covers two-thirds of our planet. Yet caught up in
our everyday lives, we seem to ignore it, and what
it means”. In The Sea Inside, Philip Hoare sets out
to rediscover the sea, its islands, birds and beasts.
Navigating between human and natural history,
between science and myth, he asks what their
stories mean for us now, in the twenty-first century,
when the sea has never been so important to our
present, as well as to our past and future.
Philip will be joined by artist filmmaker Jessica
Sarah Rinland. Together they are making a new
installation work about the whale for Utopia 2016
at Somerset House this summer.
Philip Hoare is the author of six works of
non-fiction, including Leviathan or, The Whale
(2008), which won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson
Prize for non-fiction. Hoare wrote and presented
the BBC Arena film The Hunt for Moby-Dick. He is
Professor of Creative Writing at the University of
Southampton.
Booking essential, please see the Philip Hoare
page on our website for more details or call 01227
281174. Tickets £5 (£4 concessions).
David Herd
Through
Sunday 12 June
17:15–18:00
Cinema, Horsebridge Arts Centre
David Herd will be reading from Through, his latest
book of poetry published this April. The poems
resume Herd’s inquiry into the language of public
spaceandaddressesthewaysinwhichcontemporary
public language has been rendered officially hostile.
Considering the risks that such official hostility
poses to human intimacy, Through sets out to
register broken affections, and to re-explore
possibilities of solidarity and trust. Countering
the enclosures of public discourse, the poems
embrace instead ‘a language in transition’, one
in which meaning is multiple, ‘echoing into place
a genuine and subsisting relationship’.
Herd has given readings and lectures all over
the world and his poems, essays and reviews have
been widely published in magazines, journals and
newspapers. He is Professor of Modern Literature
at the University of Kent and a co-organiser of
Refugee Tales.
Free.
Webb-Ellis, Parlor Walls, Video still, 2016

33
Hear what you eat
With Matthew Herbert
Sunday 12 June
18:00–21:30
Join us for a very special event on the last
day of the Biennale.
Whitstable based musician and composer
Matthew Herbert is writing a book titled The
Music (published by Unbound, in partnership with
Whitstable Biennale, 2017), about the formidable
and profound revolution in music that is “somewhere
buried in the last 100 years between the invention
of the microphone, the tape machine, the sampler
and the computer. Why use a violin when you can
use the sound of a packet of crisps? Why use a
packet of crisps when you can use the sound of the
explosion of a bomb in Libya?” The book is a kind of
manifesto for sound that makes this shift explicit.
A key chapter of the book focuses on food.
“The sound of crushing of garlic under a thick knife
in the kitchen of a caravan in a single, loud, curt,
dry bang is immediately followed by a snipping
off the end of a small plastic tube of liver pate on
a beach. a repeated regular stabbing with a fork
of the plastic cover to a ready meal by a nurse
on a night shift follows and on the last of the
punctures, and exactly in time, a mechanic slips
and accidentally bangs a wrench against a large
empty copper vat at the heineken factory in
amsterdam. it makes a big, echoey, metallic clang
which we listen to die away beneath the road noise.
a cargo aeroplane is overhead.” The dinner grows
out of this chapter. It will be a unique evening
f readings, recording and listening, as well as
delicious food and drink. A limited edition copy
of the chapter, specially designed by An Endless
Supply, will be given to each diner.
Booking is required, and places are limited.
Tickets are £40 (plus booking fee). For more
information and to book a place at the dinner,
see the Matthew Herbert page on our website
www.whitstablebiennale.com, email us at info@
whitstablebiennale.com or call 01843 596194.
Matthew Herbert is a pioneering and
accomplished musician, artist, producer and
writer whose range of innovative works extends
from numerous albums (including the much-
celebrated Bodily Functions) to Ivor Novello
nominated film scores (Life in a Day) as well as
music for the theatre, Broadway, TV, games and
radio. He has performed solo, as a DJ, and with a
wide range of musicians including his own 18 piece
big band all round the world from the Sydney
opera house, to the Hollywood Bowl and created
installations, plays and opera.
The dinner will be held in a special temporary
cafe, The Long Table, a collaboration between
Matthew Herbert, chef Rosie Sykes and Whitstable
Biennale, on the ground floor of the Horsebridge
Arts Centre. The cafe will be open every day of the
festival, serving light breakfasts and lunches and
all sorts of other treats from 10:00–16:30, working
with local farmers to produce a menu focussed
on the wonderful vegetables to be found at this
time of year.
Rosie Sykes is a Guardian food writer and author
of The Kitchen Revolution and the forthcoming
Sunday Evening Book. She has worked in many of
the UK’s most celebrated restaurants, set up the
critically acclaimed Sutton Arms in Smithfield, and
is development chef for the award-winning The
Pint Shop. Sykes has collaborated with Matthew
Herbert for many live performances including One
Pig, which documented a pig’s life from birth to
plate, taking a critical look at the meat industry.
The event will finish in good time for visitors to
catch the last direct train to London St. Pancras
(21:50),LondonVictoria(23:09)orRamsgate(23:06).
THE LONG
TABLE CAFÉ,
AND SPECIAL
BIENNALE
DINNER
ON 12 JUNE

35
WALKS
BIENNALE WALKING TOURS
Take a tour of the Biennale with one of
our expert guides. Our weekend tours help
visitors navigate the festival, visiting the
key venues and dropping into some of the
time-based events, according to the day’s
schedule.
All walks start from (and finish) at
the Horsebridge Arts Centre. Booking
is advisable as places are limited, but a
few places will be available for walk-ins.
Please see the relevant project pages at
whitstablebiennale.com for more details,
or call 01227 281174. The walking tours
are free.
WEEKDAY THEMATIC WALKS
Weekday tours are free-flowing and family
friendly, combining visits to the 2016 festival
artworks with fascinating, thematic tours
of Whitstable.
All walks start from (and finish) at
the Horsebridge Arts Centre. Booking is
advisable as places are limited, but a few
places will be available for walk-ins each
day. Please see the relevant project pages
at whitstablebiennale.com for more details,
or call 01227 281174. The walks are free.
Smellwalk with Kate McLean
Monday 6 June
14:00–16:00
Unlike the eyes, we can’t close our noses. We
breathe 24,000 times a day immersed in smells,
but only paying occasional attention. Smellwalking
— walking ‘nose-first’ — proposes a new knowledge
of place — what can we learn about Whitstable
from the way it smells? Leave your assumptions
and embarrassment at home — this sniffing
activity is always surprising and attracts curiosity
from onlookers! Led by Kate McLean, artist,
designer and smellscape mapper, currently Senior
Lecturer in Graphic Design at Canterbury Christ
Church University. In partnership with FRANK.
History Tour with Kerry Mayo
Tuesday 7 June
14:00–16:00
Whether you’re a long-term resident or recent fan
of Whitstable, this walk will take you on a journey
through the streets of the town as well as back
through the years. By comparing images from last
century with how the town looks now, Kerry Mayo
will describe the changes that can be seen and the
history that lies behind them. Mayo is a local writer
and photographer whose book, Whitstable Through
Time, was published in 2014. A long-standing
member of the Whitstable Women Writers writing
group, Mayo took part in the 2015 Whitstable
Literary festival.
Wild Walk
Tuesday 7 June
18:00–20:00
We often take our local natural environment for
granted, imagining a more exciting landscape, more
interesting wildlife elsewhere. Join us on a (leisurely!)
Wild Walk from the Horsebridge Arts Centre towards
Seasalter to discover more about Whitstable’s
natural history and wildlife, expertly led by the
Saturday 4 June
14:00–16:00
JJ Charlesworth, art critic and publisher of
ArtReview magazine.
Sunday 5 June
14:00–16:00
Alexandra White, independent curator based in
London and Los Angeles.
Saturday 11 June
14:00–16:00
Jennifer Thatcher, public programmes curator
and freelance art critic, including for Art Monthly
and ARTnews.
Sunday 12 June
14:00–16:00
Skye Sherwin, freelance art writer and regular
contributor to The Guardian, who teaches art
and culture journalism at City University.
Kent Wildlife Trust. A registered charity founded
in 1958, the Trust is the leading conservation
organisation covering Kent and Medway, and is
dedicated to protecting wildlife and their habitats
for everyone to enjoy.
Free. All ages. Dogs on leads welcome.
Art Critic’s Tour with Oliver Basciano
Wednesday 8 June
14:00–16:00
Come and hear an art critic’s take on the Biennale,
maybe picking up some writing tips along the way.
Oliver Basciano is an art critic based in London.
Since 2009 he has worked at ArtReview where
he is now Editor (International). He also regularly
writes for The Guardian and Spike Art Quarterly
and has contributed texts to various artists’
monographs.
Birdwalk with Andy Malone
Thursday 9 June
14:00–16:00
Explore Whitstable from the perspective of birds
— those that are resident, the summer and winter
visitors, and those that migrate through the town.
Over 200 species have been recorded in and
around Whitstable. Andy Malone is an artist,
naturalist, lecturer and Chair of the Whitstable
Biennale.
Foodie Tour with Emma Wilcox
Friday 10 June
14:00–16:00
Explore the Biennale from the perspective of
an avid food lover. Benefiting as it does from
the working harbour, ancient oyster beds and its
place in the ‘Garden of England’, Whitstable has
a well-earned reputation for its food and drink.
Emma Wilcox is a creative producer, arts manager
and glutton who has established a pop-up
supperclub in Faversham that celebrates that
all is great about Kentish food and drink. She
is always keen to share her love for food. Emma
has contributed Phaidon’s new publication
Where to Eat Pizza.
Sally O’Reilly, Guided Walk, Whitstable Biennale 2006,
photograph Simon Steven

37
plains, and even the Land of the Dead. In Ocelot’s
storytelling, history blends with fairytale. He’s one
of contemporary cinema’s great animators, and
this tremendous addition to his catalogue has
pleasures for children and adults alike.
Zarafa
Rémi Bezançon, Jean-Christophe Lie
(PG, 2012, France / Belgium, 78 mins)
Saturday 11 June
09:00
Under a baobab tree, an old man tells a story to
the children around him: The story of the undying
friendship between Maki, a child aged 10, and
Zarafa, an orphaned giraffe, who was sent as a
gift from the Pasha of Egypt to the King of France,
Charles X. Hassan, Prince of the Desert, is instructed
by the Pasha to deliver Zarafa to France. But Maki
has made up his mind to do everything in his power
to stop Hassan fulfilling his mission and to bring
the giraffe back to its native land — even if it
means risking his life. During a long journey that
takes them from Sudan to Paris, passing on the
way through Alexandria, Marseille and the
snow-capped Alps, they have many adventures,
crossing paths with the aviator Malaterre, and a
pair of unusual cows called Mounh and Sounh, and
the pirate Bouboulina. (Children’s Cinema Club)
Le Petit Nicolas
Laurent Tirard
(PG, 2009, Belgium / France, 91 mins)
Sunday 12 June
09:00
This dark, slightly absurdist comedy from France
topped the French box office in 2009, becoming
a local phenomenon. It is narrated by Nicolas
(Maxime Godart), an eight-year-old boy supremely
happy with his loving, doting parents and a colorful
group of friends. It seems that life couldn’t possibly
improve — until Nicolas eavesdrops on his folks
and surmises that his mother is pregnant. Horrified,
he envisions a scenario where a new baby brother
arrives and crowds him out of the house, leaving
his parents with no time to care for him. Nicolas
and his friends then cook up a series of wild
schemes to dispose of the baby. (Nathan Southern)
All ages are welcome at our whole
programme, except where age restrictions
are marked. This section lists events
aimed particularly at children. All family
events are free.
conquer, think and create. Led by Angela Bonner
and Bonnie Grainger, a duo who met through their
love of dance, good tunes and good fun. Grainger
runs storytelling workshops with Imagination,
and Bonner runs dance and music workshops
for babies and toddlers across Kent with Bopshop
and Animalphabets.
Free. First come, first served as limited space.
Suitable for ages 3–7 (accompanied by an adult).
FAMILY FILMS IN THE FESTIVAL CINEMA
Horsebridge Arts Centre
Our family films are free. No booking
necessary, first come first served.
The films are rated PG, and under 12s
need to be accompanied by an adult.
A Cat in Paris
Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol
(PG, 2010, France / Belgium, 70 mins)
Saturday 4 June
11:30
There’s a cat burglar in this gorgeously rendered
animated feature... There is also a cat, Dino, who
leads a double life: By day, he curls up, purring,
alongside little Zoe, who lives with her mother in
a sun-speckled apartment. But when darkness
falls, the frisky feline leaps from the window,
dances across a long wall, and heads for the attic
garret of Nico, an acrobatic thief. Together, the
cat and the cat burglar make off with cash, jewels,
art. The animators use color and line exquisitely
and the story is engaging and exciting, a caper
that appeals to both children and adults. Chases
and abductions, a visit to the zoo, and a climactic
face-off amid the gargoyles and towering spires
of the cathedral of Notre Dame ensue. A Cat
in Paris is thrilling, and a thrilling example of
traditional ink and paint cartooning. (Steven Rea)
Tales of the Night
Michel Ocelot
(PG, 2011, France, 84 mins)
Sunday 5 June
11:00
Tales of the Night, a hit at the Berlin Film Festival,
extends the earlier shadow puppet style of Ocelot’s
work, with black silhouetted characters set off
against exquisitely detailed Day-Glo backgrounds
bursting with color and kaleidoscopic patterns.
The film weaves together six exotic fables each
unfolding in a unique locale, from Tibet, to
medieval Europe, an Aztec kingdom, the African
FAMILY
Art Crèche
Saturday 4 June & Sunday 5 June,
14:00–17:00
Horsebridge Arts Centre
Wriggly child, who doesn’t love art as much as you?
No problem. Drop them off at the Biennale’s
professionally run pop-up crèche, and we’ll look
after them while you take a walking tour, watch a
screening or just wander around the artworks. Lots
of toys and activities will be provided for all ages,
from babies up to 12 years old. There are a limited
20 places for each of the two dates, so do book
early (by 1 June latest). Run by local company,
Kent Crèches, who follow Ofsted guidelines,
and use qualified and experienced staff.
Free but booking essential, please see the
Art Crèche page on our website for more details
or call 01227 281174.
A Whitstable Story Map
Saturday 11 June
11:00–13:00
Horsebridge Arts Centre
We need your help to create a story map of
Whitstable! We want to hear all about your
favourite things: places to go and places to hide,
favourite things to eat, taste, smell or listen to,
and your memories of Whitstable or your stories
to tell. We even want to hear the things you don’t
like! What makes you love Whitstable and all
things local? Come and add your drawings and
words to our Whitstable Story Map. This workshop
is run by Suki Hayes-Watkins and Karen Radford
from The Print Block, a screen-printing studio
based on The East Quay, Whitstable.
All ages welcome, just drop in.
Story Boppers
Sunday 12 June, 11:00–13:00
Horsebridge Arts Centre
Let’s go on a map adventure! Come on a journey
with us to different lands using your imagination.
Visit the country of kindness, of courageousness
and of silliness. With an original story, a bag of
props, good humour, music and cool dance to
Jeremy Deller, Sacrilege, Whitstable Biennale 2012,
photograph Matt Wilson

38 39
SATELLITE
The Satellite Programme provides an open platform
to artists wanting to exhibit work alongside our
main programme. This non-selected, non-curated
programme reflects the diverse artistic practices
across Kent and beyond, and gives artists the
opportunity to experiment and test new works
with audiences. Approximately 50 Satellite
projects involving around 70 artists can be seen
in Whitstable over the course of the festival.
For further details about the the artists taking
part and the schedule, pick up a brochure at the
Horsebridge Arts Centre, or visit the Whitstable
Biennale website.
SATELLITE
& OFFSITE
OFFSITE
Ben Judd
Stories in the Dark: Contemporary
Responses to the Magic Lantern
19 March–19 June
Every day 09:00–17:00 except Thursday
closes at 19:00 and Sunday opens at 10:00.
Beaney House of Art and Knowledge, 18
High Street, Canterbury, CT1 2RA
Artists: Jordan Baseman, Adam Chodzko, Benedict
Drew, Louisa Fairclough, Dryden Goodwin, Haroon
Mirza, Lindsay Seers, and Guy Sherwin.
This exhibition focuses on the magic lantern, a
projection device invented in the twentieth century
which is often seen as a precursor to the cinema.
Historically, magic lantern shows were the first time
people saw projected moving images, and were
used for storytelling, education, and entertainment.
In profound contrast to our digital age in which the
technology is largely incomprehensible, the magic
lantern’s relatively simple analogue mechanisms
and projected images paradoxically allow a sense of
wonder, in which the viewer suspends disbelief and
engages their imagination. Unlike the pre-recorded
nature of cinema, the creative act takes place live
with the audience, encouraging participation.
Stories in the Dark brings together contemporary
international artists who are responding to the
medium in the Beaney Museum’s special exhibitions
gallery. Work is also embedded within the unique
permanent collections, which provide an ideal
context for this work. The Victorian museum’s
obsession with collecting and categorising objects
from around the world can be seen reflected in
the lantern’s use as a tool for bringing the distant,
often ‘exotic’ and unseen world into close contact
with the public. It is this relationship between the
distant and the near, between the unknown and
the known, that lies at the heart of the exhibition.
The exhibition is a co-commission between
The Beaney House of Art and Knowledge and
Whitstable Biennale, and continues until 19 June.
Silke Panse and Connal Parsley
Ethics, Art and Moving Images
3 June
09:30–19:30
Cragg Lecture Theatre, University for
the Creative Arts, New Dover Road,
Canterbury CT1 3AN
Speakers: Jon Kear, Connal Parsley, Nicolas
Bourriaud, Mike Marshall, Silke Panse, Mikhail
Lylov, Oren Ben-Dor, Elke Marhöfer, Fiona
MacDonald, Phillip Warnell and Anat Pick.
The day before the festival officially opens this
transdisciplinary symposium explores how ethics
can figure eminently in the generation of art and
images after modernism and postmodernism,
starting from the premise that in the Anthropocene,
the work cannot rest upon its separation from the
world. The symposium asks what ethics are at play
in the relations between the human artist, the art,
and human and non-human models or participants.
Art theorists and practitioners as well as legal studies
scholars will probe the role of art and moving
images in the creation of ethical relations through
new materialist, eco-political and posthuman
thought and practice. The symposium is organized by
Silke Panse and Connal Parsley in a collaboration
between the University for the Creative Arts, the
Centre for Critical Thought at Kent Law School
(University of Kent) and Whitstable Biennale.
Free but registration required. See the Silke
Panse and Connal Parsley page on our website
for more details.
Edited by David Herd & Anna Pincus
Refugee Tales (Book launch)
The Gulbenkian, University of Kent,
Canterbury CT2 7NB
7 June
17:00–19:00
Refugee Tales is edited by David Herd and Anna
Pincus, and features David Herd, Abdulrazak Gurnah,
Avaes Mohammad, Marina Lewycka, Dragan
Todorovic, Michael Zand, Carol Watts, Ali Smith,
Stephen Collis, Inua Ellams, Hubert Moore, Patience
Agbabi, Jade Amoli-Jackson & Chris Cleave.
Two unaccompanied children travel across the
Mediterranean in an overcrowded boat that has
been designed to only make it halfway across…
A 63-year-old man is woken one morning by
border officers’ acting on a tip-off and suddenly
cast into the detention system with no obvious
means of escape…
An orphan whose entire life has been spent in
slavery – first on a Ghanaian farm, then as a victim
of trafficking – writes to the Home Office for help,
only to be rewarded with a jail sentence and
indefinite detention…
These are not fictions. Nor are they testimonies
from some distant, brutal past, but the frighteningly
common experiences of Europe’s new underclass
— its refugees. While those with ‘citizenship’ enjoy
basic human rights (like the right not to be detained
without charge for more than 14 days), people
seeking asylum can be suspended for years in
Kafka-esque uncertainty. Here, poets and novelists
retell the stories of individuals who have direct
experience of Britain’s policy of indefinite
immigration detention. Presenting their experiences
anonymously, as modern day counterparts to the
pilgrims’ stories in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, this
book offers rare, intimate glimpses into otherwise
untold suffering.
Free, no booking required.