Press

The Guardian: London city guide, 10 of the best arts venues in north London. May 6th 2011.

Need to kill time while waiting for a train? Search out Banner Repeater on platform one of Hackney Downs station and be bored no more. This innovative rush-hour haven should spawn a slew of art spaces in unexpected everyday environs. It's an intimate gallery with a library trolley outside and a reading room attached, but it instantly breaks down the barrier that can make wandering into an official art gallery daunting. Banner Repeater is artist-run by Ami Clarke with support from Hackney council's Empty Shops Fund.

One to One/One to Many: Dave Charlesworth at Banner Repeater - Jotta, July 2011

A train comes into the station, the floor shakes, the monologue is temporarily drowned out. I am sitting opposite artist Dave Charlesworth as part of a performance at Banner Repeater, an artist-run project space and reading room at Hackney Downs station. Images are projected sequentially onto the wall as Charlesworth narrates over the top. Images of geological, industrial and pastoral motifs mirror the content of the text. The language and dialect is slippery, full of digressions, dead ends, revisions and developments in register.

Light Writing at Banner Repeater – Frieze issue 137, March 2011

‘Light Writing’ was an exhibition that nibbled at the tail-end of several decades’ worth of experimental video- and film-based investigations into printed language. This territory is potentially huge, encompassing as it does everything from structuralism and concrete poetry to the correlation between words and power, desire and the mainstream media. Thankfully, the works selected are concise and often dryly funny. Richard Serra’s classic video Television Delivers People (1973), for example, features a blue screen and a scrolling text declaring ‘Television delivers people to the advertiser’ and ‘You are the end product’, while a cheery soap opera-style soundtrack plays in the background. The inclusion of works by Laure Prouvost, John Smith and Steve Hawley – artists of different generations with a shared taste for jocosity and incisive irony – also indicate a show with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

Banner Repeater @ Hackney Downs train station - theplayground.co.uk December 2010

Every train station should have a gallery in it. Like all good ideas, it seems obvious once you think of it. There are ongoing attempts to make certain stations places to view art, but I have yet to find one that strikes quite the balance as the project space at Hackney Downs. It's new show, Light Writing is brought to you by Banner Repeater, one of a series of projects supported by Hackney Council intended to bring empty shops and premises back to life. True, if you don’t live there, Hackney Downs station probably isn’t the first place you’d want to spend your morning, but after experiencing this exhibition, which consists of video works by a number of artists new and canonical, I felt, briefly at least, that there wasn’t any place I’d rather be.

Pop-ups - Up, up and away, The Economist November 2010

How an alternative trend went mainstream

AN EAST London train station, austere and damp, is an unlikely venue for a crash course in futurism. But in a recently renovated and temporary—or “pop-up”—exhibition space at Hackney Downs station, commuters can school themselves in it. The project, named Banner repeater, is typical of many pop-up art installations: intellectual, obscure and distinctly not for profit. But another type of pop-up has recently prospered: unashamedly commercial shops-cum-marketing tools.

Banner Repeater: art books get their platform - Jotta, November 2010

The platform of an overground station is an unlikely location for a gallery and library, but that is exactly where this enterprising graduate, Ami Clarke a recent MA Fine Art graduate of Central Saint Martins, has formed her artist-lead project, with a little help from Hackney Council’s Art in Empty Spaces, catching commuters by surprise during rush hour. jotta jumped on the train to find out more.