Past – Forward: The Wapping Project at 20

In the final episode of ‘Past – Forward’, the 21st, curator and writer Gareth Evans talks to architect Josh Wright and architecture critic Rowan Moore about the light touch approach to restoring historic industrial buildings, the nodes of contact between architecture, culture and the social fabric of places, as well as the impermanence of everything.

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In this episode of ‘Past – Forward’, curator and writer Gareth Evans talks to writer Deborah Levy on being commissioned as a young poet, learning to write librettos, and on the simplicity and directness of exchange with Jules Wright, made possible by decades of collaboration between creative minds.

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In this episode of ‘Past – Forward’, curator and writer Gareth Evans talks to composer, artist and choreographer Billy Cowie on the early collaborations with Jules Wright and Deborah Levy in the 1990s, risk averse established art institutions very unlike The Wapping Project, and on transitioning seamlessly between worlds created of music, image and text.

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In this episode of ‘Past – Forward’, curator and writer Gareth Evans is in conversation with photographer Stephen Morgan and artist and designer Sam Spenser on starting out as waiters in the restaurant at The Wapping Project, before being invited to exhibit their work within the Project’s former home the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, and on forming long lasting friendships with Jules Wright.

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In this episode of ‘Past – Forward’, curator and writer Gareth Evans talks to a quartet of Omani artists – Rawan AlMahrouqi, Safa Baluchi, Ruqaiya Mazar, Riham Noor Al Zadjali – on their experience making work in response to scores, collaborating with Elina Brotherus during a residency programme in Oman in 2019, and finding their voices as young women artists working with performance and political art.

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In the first episode of the fourth series of ‘Past – Forward’, curator and writer Gareth Evans is in conversation with artist Karen Stuke and choreographer Maresa von Stockert on working with iconic narratives, in vast industrial spaces, and the many firsts they both embraced on their encounter with Jules Wright who never settled for the easier option.

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Including soundtrack from Maresa von Stockert’s ‘Grim(m) Desires’, 2004, and music composition by Billy Cowie for Karen Stuke’s exhibition ‘After Sebald’s Austerlitz’, 2013

In the first episode of the third series of ‘Past – Forward’, curator and writer Gareth Evans is in conversation with Finnish artist Elina Brotherus on making an ambitious proposal as a very young artist that perhaps wasn’t expected, which led to her monumental video installation ‘Spring’ and to making the shortlist for the then City Bank Prize in 2002, now Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, at The Photographers’ Gallery, and her longstanding creative relationship with The Wapping Project spanning twenty years.

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In this episode of ‘Past – Forward’, curator and writer Gareth Evans talks to artist Mairéad McClean about a giant pencil, the wild beauty of the Other Hebrides, lines in the sand erased by North Atlantic waves, and how growing up close to the border on the island of Ireland made her acutely aware of any borders real or imagined.

The podcast features fragments of soundtrack from Mairead McClean’s ‘Making Her Mark’, 2018, and ‘A Line Was Drawn’, 2019, including original music by Laura Cannell.

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In this episode of ‘Past – Forward’, curator and writer Gareth Evans is in conversation with writer Kapka Kassabova about story hunting on borders, her personal connection to the shadows of borders that she keeps on returning to in her writing, and borders’ superficial binary simplicity which obscures their dynamic, multi-layered and ambiguous nature.

The podcast features a reading of Kapka Kassabova’s essay ‘To Step Across the Line’ by actor Lia Williams, commissioned and first published by The Wapping Project in 2018.

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In this episode of ‘Past – Forward’, curator and writer Gareth Evans talks to writer and book designer Imogen Eveson about creating the book The Wapping Project on Paper, in 2013, and art director Sonya Dyakova of Atelier Dyakova who was involved in the creation of the original identity for The Wapping Project in 2000 while working as an intern for Vince Frost at Frost Design, her very first job in London, and was commissioned to design The Wapping Project’s current identity in 2016 to reflect the new chapter in the life of the organisation.

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