The Horse Hospital

The Horse Hospital Are Good In Bed

~we’ve seen the pictures~

Interview by Hassni Malik for Progress Report magazine. Please check out the website - www.irrational-arts.co.uk – for further details and back editions. Hassni and colleague Dave Bourgoin also run the Irrational Arts record label, whose current 7 inch releases are by Gem In Eye ( Dame Darcy Project ) and Bobby Beausoliel. Buy them.

In May 1998, I made my way for the first time to the Horse Hospital for an exhibition of Joe Coleman’s paintings. Never having been told about the gallery before I expected something on the lines of the The Last Chance Saloon (Waterloo, London) – a cramped hotch-potch of a gallery cum shoppy bit. Boy was I wrong. You’ll hear about the background to the building in what follows, but what it won’t ready you for is the sensory impact of being within the belly of the building.
Once you’ve past through the doorway of the age old brick building, you’re immediately hit by a motherly passageway that tilts steeply upwards, reassuringly back into the womb.
Climbing the slatted slope (how the hell did an injured horse get up here?), you know you’ve found your way home. It’s an instinctive reaction to many I’ve spoken to about it. It opens out into a darkened art-space (for want of a better term). There’s a palpable presence that both unsettles and excites. Visually it’s like being plunged back into a Victorian chamber that suggests both decadence and outlandish ideals. Whether it lives up to those feelings is up to you. The room becomes what you want it to be.
I can’t recall ever feeling so at ease in any room before. Any room at all. Anything can happen here and it wouldn’t matter because you know you’ll be safe. And anything does happen. Screenings of films that don’t get a break anywhere else, live shows by the likes of Dame Darcy, free ‘club’ nights, Outsider art exhibitions, even a place to sit around for an hour or two before trudging out into the bleached outside world.
Apart from a page long item in the Evening Standard (!) and a rumour that Time Out refuse to even mention the gallery anymore (the reviewer panicked
at the Coleman exhibition), I’ve not seen any interviews about the Hospital. Out of purely selfish reasons (I want to know more about this place) an interview with curator James B.L. Hollands seemed appropriate. As a film maker himself, he has a keen eye to spot the more interesting aspects of the arts, both from within the UK and from overseas. The interview was conducted by email and while naked. Condoms were worn at all times.