What's In A Name?

Tuesday was a day of sunny skies and joy, both inside and out. It’s always good when your insides match your outsides. It was a particular gift given how I felt the day before. Sometimes I just need that little nudge that reminds me that everything passes in the end. Sometimes it’s a good day after a bad one. Sometimes it can be five minutes respite. Any bit of positive affirmation that doesn’t need me to stare at myself earnestly in the mirror and talk about how beautiful I am is welcome. I’ve tried that and I’m just too British. By British I mean massively repressed and repulsed by the idea of being nice to myself.

I usually go out in the afternoons. I try to get work and errands done in the mornings when I can’t say I’m too tired and shirk my responsibilities. I also like to stay on the boat until after lunch, because it is more fiscally responsible to eat at home than allow myself to be tempted by the thousand and one delicious places I wander by. I am always hungry so this is something I find particularly challenging at the best of times but I try.

I had things I needed to do in the afternoon, so I set off early and accepted the fact that I was just going to buy lunch and that was that. Sometimes fiscals must be irresponsible.

I took the tube to Whitechapel, emerging from the train to be greeted by the wonderful collages of Chantal Joffe, an artist who spent time capturing the people of Whitechapel coming and going and created twenty artworks that adorn the walls of the Elizabeth Line. So much art in London is public and free, if you know where to look.

I was going to the Whitechapel Gallery, which is somewhere I’ve been meaning to go to and somehow always failed to arrive at before. It’s a stunning building. The outside is a kind of pinky, orange stone, like a warm peach in the sun. If it wasn’t so grubby I’d have definitely wanted to lick it. It looks like a late Victorian, arts and crafts design which is enhanced by a bunch of what appear to be gold leaves floating down the front from the top. Inside, before you even consider the art it’s just an enjoyable space to be in. I get inordinately excited by lovely hand rails and door knobs at this time in my life and it has those aplenty. I really wanted to just lie on the floor and absorb the building, but I expect that unless I managed to get myself a space as an art exhibit, that kind of lolling around is frowned upon.

The exhibition currently on show, which is free to visit and on until 17th September is called: Life Is More Important Than Art: That’s Why Art Is Important - which is a quotation by James Baldwin. It shows the work of multiple artists who are all interested in exploring the value of art at times of social and economic uncertainty. It’s an ambitious and interesting idea approached in multiple ways. Some of it I loved but didn’t understand. Some of it I didn’t like but did understand. Some of it I adored. All of it made me think.

My favourite piece was The J Street Project by Susan Hiller. On a residency in Berlin, Hiller noticed a street called Judenstrasse - the street of the Jews. It marked a place where Jewish people had been but were no longer. Over the space of three years, Hiller tracked down 303 roads, streets and paths in Germany that marked the places where the Jewish communities who the streets were named after were obliterated, leaving only the empty streets behind. Hiller photographed and filmed each street for her project. In a room of the gallery, all the photographs are mounted on one wall, with a map showing where the photos were taken on another. In a separate room is a 67 minute long video montage of all the places she visited to take the photographs. It’s an eerie homage to ghosts, memory and the power of place to retain what is otherwise forgotten. It’s incredibly sad and really powerful when you are confronted with such a barrage of photographs of absence.

At a more mundane level, it made me think of all the roads I’ve travelled in recent weeks where the original meaning of the road name has been lost, particularly here in Docklands. Now there are only the words to pin history in place.

When I emerged back into the hustle and bustle of a noisy street, I felt like I’d been overwintering in a cave and spring had sprung without me being there to witness it.

As predicted, I was starving. Luckily Jason scooted up to meet me and took me for lunch so it was him that was fiscally irresponsible and not me. We went to a brunch place called Grounded, which had queues when I had walked up the road and still had a queue when we walked back down. That, on a road that is amply served with alternatives was a good sign so we waited patiently for our turn and were rewarded with an extremely delicious lunch.

After lunch, Jason went off to work and I carried on exploring. I walked round Altab Ali Park, watching Londoners enjoying the sunshine. The park had originally been the site of a 14th Century church, some of the remains of which have been preserved within it. It’s named after a young, Bengali leather worker who was murdered nearby in a racist attack in 1978. There is a memorial to him and the arch at the entrance to the park is designed to represent a mingling of Bengali and British symbols to commemorate those who have suffered racist attacks and build harmony between the different cultures. There is a sinuous streamer of ribbon, worked in red metal that flows around the arch which is so cleverly made it looks like real ribbon.

In the warm, afternoon sun, workers ate their lunch, children ran about playing elaborate games of tag, homeless people dozed and people from all walks of life co-existed peacefully on a tiny patch of green in one of the biggest cities in the world. All around us, traffic sped by and buildings hummed with industry, but in this space, if only for a moment, all that paused. People rested and replenished themselves in a place that has been a sanctuary of one kind or another for hundreds of years and is still providing for the people it serves. It seemed a good note to leave on.