Website www.artangel.org.uk | Purpose Arts organisation | |
Headquarters 31 Eyre Street HillLondonEC1R 5EW Directors James LingwoodMichael Morris | ||
Artangel is a London-based arts organisation founded in 1985 by Roger Took. Directed since 1991 by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, it has commissioned and produced a string of notable site-specific works, plus several projects for TV, film, radio and the web. Notable past works include the Turner Prize-winning House by Rachel Whiteread (1993), Break Down by Michael Landy (2001) and Seizure by Roger Hiorns (2008–2010), also nominated for the Turner Prize in 2009.
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A 2002 article in The Daily Telegraph described the organisation as creating "art that operates by ambush, rather than asking you to pay up before you see it", while a 2007 profile in The Observer noted that "Artangel has worked with exceptional artists to produce some of the most resonant works of our time, in some very unusual places". These have included a condemned council flat (Seizure, 2008–2010), a former postal sorting office (Küba, 2005), a vacated general plumbing store (An Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty, 2002) and the former Oxford Street branch of the C&A department store (Break Down, 2001).
Ongoing projects
While many of Artangel's projects are intrinsically temporary, certain works have a longer-term remit.
1 January 2000 saw the launch of Jem Finer's Longplayer, a musical composition which will continue playing until the end of the year 2999. Longplayer can be heard via an online stream, at listening posts internationally and at occasional live performances.
In 2007, a former municipal library building in the Icelandic town of Stykkishólmur was transformed into VATNASAFN/Library of Water, a project by Roni Horn that includes an archive of glacial water and a selection of weather 'reports' by residents of Iceland. It operates as a community space and is host to a writers' residency programme.
Janet Cardiff's East London audio walk The Missing Voice (Case Study B) (1999) is still available as a download from the Artangel website.
Sukdhev Sandhu's 2005 commission Night Haunts, an exploration of London during night-time, is available as a standalone website, as is 2008 Artangel Interaction project Crisis in the Credit System by artist Melanie Gilligan.
Several other works, such as Richard Billingham's Fishtank (1998), Paul Pfeiffer's The Saints (2007) and Charles LeDray's Mens Suits (2009), continue to be exhibited internationally.
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov's 1998 work The Palace of Projects resides permanently at a former salt store in the Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex in Essen, Germany.
Notable patrons as special angels include Carolyn Dailey.
Artangel collaborative projects
Interaction is a department within Artangel dedicated to collaborative projects which involve specific communities in their creative process. Projects include "At the Crossroads with Vincent" (2015) by R.M. Sanchez-Camus and CoolTan Arts a charity for people with mental distress, "A Tender Subject" (2012) by Mark Storor and ex-offenders and gay prison guards, Smother (2009) by Sarah Cole and young parents from the Coram foundation and Did You Kiss the Foot that Kicked You? by Ruth Ewan and buskers from across London. Rachel Anderson has been Head of Interaction since 2007.