Gritty Drama at the East End Film Festival

Last month Over Informed interviewed art entrepreneur Ben Moore, founder of Art Below and all round creative machine. Ben has been working flat out of late on a wide variety of projects, one of which being the creation of a documentary film; ‘A Day in the Life of Dan’ which was recently screened at the Rich Mix Cinema in Shoreditch as part of the East London Film Festival.

Interview with Anisha Jogani, Co-curator of ‘The Aroma Diner’

On 16^th April 2010, a group of young artists are set to stage a fascinating, experiential event as part of the Raw Canvas Twenty For Harper Road series. Inspired by society’s bizarre and increasingly unbalanced relationship with food today, 24 Harper Road, will become home to a brand new and totally original dining experience:  The Aroma Diner.

The Aroma diner is a multi-disciplinary project combining art, design, science and architecture in order to create an immersive environment of sensory pleasures. The concept involves hosting a four course meal in the project space, to be enjoyed purely through smell and smell alone. In order to discover more about this innovative project, I posed some questions to Anisha Jogani; exhibition co-curator and the brains behind the initial concept.

Interview With Art Below Founder, Ben Moore

In an insightful chat with Art Below’s eccentric founder and director Ben Moore the conversation spanned across everything from The Life of Brian and eco-farms to spiritual quests, ambitions and of course a bit of art was thrown in for good measure.

Not long into the conversation with Ben it became clear his greatest desire in life is to be “free”. He spent many years fighting the shackles of employment only to now find himself director of his own company, trapped by the constraints of running a business. “For a while it was hard” he admits, “I never planned for Art Below last as long as it has. It started out with a laptop and a phone but as soon as the banks got involved there were suddenly debts to pay and the only way to stay afloat was to keep the business running. It was a sort of spiral really”. But today, the project is going from strength to strength, now established in Tokyo and Berlin and fast developing links in Paris, Hong Kong, Stockholm and Dubai over 800 artists have displayed their work to tens on millions of commuters thanks to Art Below.

The Aroma-Diner by Twenty For Harper Road

Great art is all about evoking reaction through sensory pleasure, be it visual, aural, physical or even through scent. Now Raw Canvas brings you The Aroma Diner; a four course meal, enjoyed purely through smell. Aroma Diner is part of a series of twenty exhibitions currently being staged at 24 Harper Road, as part of the Twenty For Harper Road project.

Zebra Finches Rock the Joint

Image: from here to ear (detail), 2007. Photograph : Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. © Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. Courtesy Galerie Xippas

The latest exhibition at the Barbican art space, The Curve, comprises of electric guitars and percussion symbols furnishing a man-made desert of sand and shrubs. Sounding perfectly feasible so far? Fairly ordinary in fact in the context of the off the wall pieces we have come to expect of modern art today. The fact that this installation is also an aviary, home to a flock of tiny zebra finches flying freely amongst spectators is where things start to get interesting.