Through to 13th June 2011
This exhibition is a doorway to my body, my home, my mother’s home, my family, my friends, my London, my island, this Britain. – Edwin Burdis
Home Service, an exhibition by British artist and musician Edwin Burdis (b.1974), explores the notion of home, both as a personal refuge and as a collective national experience.
During the show’s five-week run, Burdis will be resident in the Hayward Project Space – using it as an exhibition space for an eye-catching installation, a studio and a venue for regular performances and gigs. It will also be used as a place to interact with visitors to the gallery and a range of invited guests from across the spectrum of British society – from ambulance drivers and commercial gallerists, to bike couriers and computer games designers, and butchers and tabloid journalists to artists and musicians. There will also be performances by Liverpool’s legendary Deaf School (29 May) and Burdis’ own band, Longmeg (12 June).
Burdis will record his interactions with these visitors and compile them in a weekly ‘radio show’, also entitled Home Service, which will be broadcast over a set of speakers on the Hayward Gallery’s façade and via the website www.home-service.org.uk, developed with Kieron Livingston.
The words ‘Home Service’, of course, evoke the BBC radio station that broadcast from 1939 to 1967, providing news, informational programming and drama – a remit now covered by BBC Radio 4.
The back room of the Project Space functions as Burdis’ workshop. While the exhibition will look ‘complete’ from day one, Burdis is making work in situ during the course of his residency, creating a dynamic and ever-changing environment. Visitors to Burdis’ exhibition enter through a doorway in the shape of a human mouth, made out of painted plywood in the artist’s trademark, cartoon style – part Robert Crumb, part Philip Guston. For Burdis, the body is the only ‘home’ we inhabit for the whole of our lives, and is the basis for thinking about every other kind of ‘home’, from domestic dwellings to nations. Within the gallery there is a recreation of Burdis’ bedroom in his mother’s home featuring lilac walls, the camp bed on which Burdis slept, and recreations of the wall drawings of cartoonish organic forms with which the artist decorated his former home.
The exhibition is curated by Tom Morton.
Edwin Burdis lives and works in London. Last year he collaborated with choreographer Rosemary Butcher to recreate Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, as part of the Hayward Gallery’s exhibition Move: Choreographing You.
Edwin Burdis: Home Service The Hayward Gallery Project Space, Southbank Centre
Admission Free 10am – 6pm every day, late night opening on Thursday and Friday until 8pm
HOME SERVICE
Free events in the Hayward Project Space
Daily: Visits from invited guests (please see timetable in exhibition space)
Each Sunday: New episode of Home Service uploaded to:
www.home-service.org.uk
Sat May 28, 6:30pm – 8:30pm: The Sun is Our First Oven – Talk by The Gut Club and performance by Man Like Me
Sun May 29, 3pm – 5pm: Andy Holden and Deaf School – Film, archive and performance event featuring artist Andy Holden and seminal Liverpool band Deaf School
Sun June 12, 3pm – 5pm: Longmeg and Jon Jon the Demigod – Performance and talk
