Welcome to the London For Fun regular newsletter keeping you up to date with what's new in London`s events.

LONDON FOR FUN Newsletter: 23 September 2008 Issue No.156

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http://www.londonforfun.com
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1.) Top 10 London events
2.) Other Events, Theatre listings, Museums and Galleries
3.) How to unsubscribe

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1. Top 10 London events
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1 - Tony Oursler - The show will use both Lisson Gallery spaces to exhibit new installations and key earlier works. Oursler's practice explores a complex web of societal constraints and psychological dilemmas. The new body of work developed for this exhibition delves into the real/fantastic morass of obsessive desires and needs, or the "reason" of the irrational. The new works in this show conjure these psycho-social fractures in tragicomic fashion. Oversized mundane objects and neurotic activities become agents of internal dramas that defy diagnosis. One highly theatricalised tableau will feature a forest of slowly burning columnar cigarettes, the only audio is the eerie amplification of an invisible smoker's inhalation. Until 3 October. www.lissongallery.com

2 - Runa Islam: featuring Tobias Putrih - For this exhibition, Islam is presenting a 35mm film and two 16mm films in a sculptural installation by Tobias Putrih. This is the second in a series of collaborations between the two artists that was initiated by Islam for her exhibition at Galleria Civica, Modena in January 2008. Until 4 October. www.whitecube.com

3 - Banks Violette - The show is constructed around the way the gallery is divided - a performance downstairs, and a re-construction of that performance upstairs. The performance consists of Stephen O’Malley and his band sunnO))) playing on stages, with the focus involving a singer named Attila Csihar in a sealed coffin, on vocals throughout. At the end of the piece, the musical equipment is removed, leaving only the stage, backdrop, and a ruined coffin in the downstairs gallery. In the upstairs space, every piece of equipment used for the performance is recast in salt essentially, the upstairs is a ghostly, elegiac reconstruction of the downstairs performed work - the only “evidence “or documentation of what the audience was blocked from seeing downstairs. In addition, there is a series of drawings that is used in a later vinyl release of the performance, so even the drawings are an imperfect record, as they’re ultimately intended as an “illustration", or rather something whose real life only exists as a reproduction. Until 19 October. www.maureenpaley.com

4 - Four Seasons by Candlelight - The critically acclaimed Mozart Festival Orchestra returns by public demand with another exquisite collection of popular 18th Century and Baroque classics reflecting the elegance and style of the period. 19 October. www.royalalberthall.com

5 - David Blandy - Duels and Dualities: Artprojx Dojo - An examination of the quest for the authentic and the spiritual in the ephemeral world of popular culture. Can you ever find the self in the other? The battle is a fundamental aspect of many underground cultural movements- the M.C. battle, the one on one beat-em-up, cutting heads in a blues guitar duel, or turntabilst vs. turntablist. The Artprojx Dojo will explore these legacies, and how the idea of a quest for perfection is pursued through them. Bringing together an array of underground artistic forms, Kung fu and Chanbara flicks, hardcore fighting arcade games, comics and a dub sound system, Blandy continues his quest for identity. Creating an installation that crosses kung fu art emporium and amusement arcade with a fully kitted out range of bins and speaker cabinets by the legendary Manasseh Sound System, Artprojx Dojo will feature David Blandy's films, photography, posters, stickers, and kung fu artifacts. Until 25 October. www.artprojxspace.com

6 - The Royal Art Lodge - Learned Helplessness - Learned Helplessness comprises 160 tiny new works, each a miniscule 2” square. The Royal Art Lodge’s new paintings operate as hybrid forms of a collective psyche. The scale of the works may be minute but their message is as bold and compelling as ever. Still dominated by poignant figures, both human and animal, the Lodge’s paintings pull the individual artist away from their own persona towards a collective place that takes on an aesthetic of its own. Each small work offers a vignette of poetic absurdity, underpinned with the logic of a distinctive humour and outlook. What is achieved is a pure moment of artistic freethinking, using dichotomous relationships, such as play and violence, detail and abstraction, to create a narrative that mimics the ludicrous textures of real life. Until 25 October. www.houldsworth.co.uk

7 - Roger Hiorns - Seizure - Hiorns makes exceptional use of unlikely materials: detergent, disinfectant, perfume, fire and copper sulphate crystals. Transforming steel poles, car engines and cardboard architectural models into crystalline forms, Hiorns effects surprising, physical and aesthetic transformations on found objects. In SEIZURE, the artist precipitates an unexpected sculptural form within the fabric of a housing estate near London Bridge. Architecture and modernist sculpture continue to be important touchstones for Hiorns' work, and both have strongly informed the development of this major new commission. For his first workwithin an urban site Hiorns' makes a radical shift of scale and context, and promises the development of an extraordinary chemical intervention in the heart of the city. Until 2 November. www.artangel.org.uk

8 - Soho Archives: 1950s & 1960s - In the heart of the West End, Soho has long been a haven for creativity and criminality, scandal and sexuality, and a source of inspiration for photographers. The three fascinating archives in this exhibition document this bohemian area of London, famed in the 50s and 60s for its vibrancy and exoticism. From 26 September until 16 November. www.photonet.org.uk

9 - Pierre Bismuth and Michel Gondry - The new Gallery commission at BFI Southbank is a collaboration between visual artist Pierre Bismuth and acclaimed film director Michel Gondry. For the BFI they have created a new version of The All-seeing Eye, an installation which explores, this time in the visual arts field, the themes at the core of the feature movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directed by Gondry and based on an original idea by Bismuth, and for which they got the 2005 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, making Bismuth the only contemporary artist to ever have received an Oscar. The exhibition explores one of the most successful collaborations to date between a contemporary artist and a filmmaker and exemplifies how today film and art are interconnected. Until 16 November. www.bfi.org.uk

10 - Monkey: Journey To the West - Monkey: Journey to the West is a new opera for the 21st century, directed by the world renowned Chen Shi-Zheng, with music composed by Gorillaz award-winning mastermind Damon Albarn, and design and animation by Jamie Hewlett based on the ancient Chinese legend of spiritual enlightenment. This reworked version is a dazzling spectacle involving nearly 40 circus acrobats, martial artists and singers from China with an orchestra of Western and traditional Chinese instruments. Monkey, headstrong, self-important hero of the story, is hatched from a stone egg on the Mountain of Flower and Fruit. After crossing the all-powerful Buddha, Monkey is given the opportunity to redeem himself by travelling to India with the young monk Tripitaka to bring the Holy Scriptures back to China. From 8 November until 5 December. Buy theatre tickets

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2. Other Events, Theatre listings, Museums and Galleries

Events listing:
http://www.londonforfun.com/events-in-London.htm

Theatre listings:
http://www.londonforfun.com/London-theatres.htm

Museum listing:
http://www.londonforfun.com/London-museums.htm

Galleries listings:
http://www.londonforfun.com/galleries-in-London.htm

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