GHost
Friday 19 December 2008, 6.30pm – 10.00pm
St Johns Church Bethnal Green
Hosted by Ami Clarke, Belfry Project Space
Guest-curated by Sarah Sparkes & Ricarda Vidal
In 1953 Marcel Duchamp made an artwork titled “A Guest + A Host = A Ghost”. The mysterious phrase was inscribed on the tinfoil wrappers of candy that was handed out during an opening of William Copley’s show at Nina Dausset in Paris.
Etymologically “guest” and “host” do indeed go back to the same roots. The Middle English (h)oste meant both “guest” and “host”. It also meant “stranger, alien” and it is only a small step from there to “ghost”, to the disembodied spirit, the shadowy or evanescent form wandering among the living like an uninvited guest.
For this show we take Duchamp’s calculation literally and add an association of our own. As the nights grow darker, the scent of mulled wine and hot chestnuts drifts through the streets, and shining stars and colourful baubles appear in the shop windows, hosts, ghosts, guests and sweets all combine to conjure the spirit of Christmas.
With Ami Clarke as curator of the Belfry project in the role of the Host and artist/curator Sarah Sparkes and curator Ricarda Vidal in the role of the Guests we have put together a night of Ghosts. Following the Christmas tradition of telling ghost stories on the long dark winter nights and in the footsteps of Charles Dickens, M.R. James and the BBC, this will be a night of spooky yarns to warm you up on a chilly winter evening.
The show will spread over the whole of St Johns Church, spilling from the cobwebbed dark alcoves of the belfry into the entrance hall, past the red velvet curtains and into the church proper. There will be performances, video, sound and scent installations, and sculptures in the foyer and the belfry. The church itself will open its doors later in the evening, when we will screen a programme of artist films followed by Jonathan Miller’s “Whistle and I’ll come to you” (1968), an adaptation of the eponymous M.R. James story.