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A Place In-Between residency and exhibition

  • Anka Dabrowska
  • Jacob Calland.tms
  • Alex Noble

May-July 2021 “A Place In-Between” is a participatory project to celebrate and to reinforce connections in local communities, between parts of Margate, between land and sea, between myself and my environment. The heart of the project centres on working with diverse and new audiences located in some of the most deprived wards in the country through talk, interactive workshop, action research and an exhibition. With the focus on the School’s theme of art, society, nature, the impact of Covid-19, diversity and inclusion. The new work will challenge my current practice in context, location and scale as well as due to the interaction with other artists form a diverse community and the direct/ indirect connection with The Margate School, with a focus on the British seaside history from a perspective of an outsider: myself, from elsewhere, living elsewhere. I will be working with two locations: Arlington House, the 18-storey residential apartment block built in 1964 at the seafront and the 1920’s Lido, the cream coloured derelict Art Deco Complex, closed since the 80s. Working with ‘the street’, the community and the urban/rural/seafront environment. The interest is in the architecture, history, myths, stories from locals (old, new and transient) and what links the two locations. Final exhibition: A combination of small scale drawings to accompany the large scale sculptural installation on the view from the outside and on the inside of the building. A recorded soundtrack and projected research material to complement the whole and to give more insight into my research. The project is kindly supported by The Arts Council England, TMS and private Crowdfunding campaign.

Anka Dabrowska
A Place In-Between
The Primark Building
Private View: Friday 25th of June 6.00 - 9.00
Exhibition Runs: 26th of June - 26th of July
Artist Anka Dabrowska brings her delicate drawings and assemblage sculptures to Margate for the first time this summer, through a residency at the Margate School, culminating with an exhibition at the old Primark building.
A fitting setting for her practice based and site specific research project ‘A Space In-between’ which ruminates and emerges from her experience of the residency in Margate. Not only as an architectural urban landscape, swelling on the cliff sides of the South coast of England, but also as a peoples and multitude of cultures in tension and coalition, present and past, as we move into the future post pandemic.
Anka’s work assembles itself in these polarities as her materiality is of remnant findings of the exact constructions of urban sites that serve or deny us, that are breached or acquired, developed for or excluding demographics of locals new and old.
In a world of outsiders, immigrants and transience we are continually confronted with the space that is filled with other peoples memories, our own impressions, buildings with intentions and opportunities that are open to some and closed to others.
Anka is perfectly situated to navigate this role of urban anthropologist as her own experience of domestic dwellings, urban spaces, and survival are expansive. Having migrated across borders of countries, class, gender and sexual identity. She is a self proclaimed outsider and this is one of her powers, to connect the dots of human ecologies as she does with the ink that creates her delicate drawings of organic life forms.
Life forms in contrast to the assemblage structures that echo her memory as interpretation of the spaces she visits. Scraps of wood, foam and insulation, heterogeneous material from building sites, skips and back yards are reconstructed to create small scale impressions of the structures of our urban lives. In concrete there is breath, air that penetrates brutalist sedimentary structures that house human existence.
Colour is a retaliation to mass construction and development, as words are sprayed onto wood chip and solid dust, poetry of hope and of dismay, of actualisation and rebellion from the classes below the invisible line of economic hierarchy.
Through her inclusion of graffiti and slogans, the power of voice and of art making are embedded in her structures; the writing is on the wall, as is Anka’s nature for protest, activism and showing up for community.
Anka has been collecting stories as an oral archive from local residents as they share what they want to on the subject of Margate and specifically Arlington House and the old Lido site.
An archive that will be played as a soundscape to the 3D installation of structures and drawings in the Place In-between.
Words by Lo Lo No @doublesidedstickytape
Anka Dabrowska @ankadabrowskaart www.ankadabrowskaart.com
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