With a tip-off from Art Licks last Tuesday, I headed to Whitechapel for an evening of performance at The Mews Project Space, programmed by co-founders Carlos Noronha Feio and Mikael Larsson.  If you’ve not been before, I highly recommend you make your way to this back-alley space, just behind the Whitechapel gallery and a few feet off the high street up Brick Lane.

The Mews is hidden behind an unassuming industrial grey gate, super easy to miss if you don’t know what you’re looking for! But luckily I arrived just in time to meet Patrick Coyle on his way in, whose performance was first in the evening’s line-up. Coyle’s work, Alphabetes, took us on an alphabetical tour of twenty six items of ephemera and printed material that he’d pinned, from A to Z, at head height around the Project Space. Handing everyone a print-out of the tour to follow as he read it aloud himself, he wittily presented a work that tripled up as a performance, a text and a series of curated objects. Crafting slippages between the visual and verbal quality of language, he played with our experience of what was heard, read and seen. View his work on re-title.com.

Next up, in an intimate room no-bigger-than-a-bike-shed, Bettina Wind’s slide show performance, familiar stories (and other strange discoveries) guided us through a carousel of archival family photographs, building visual narratives and drawing fictional lines between each image. Her work links quite beautifully with a show recently showing at Battersea Arts Centre, ‘Class of 76’ by Third Angel. Read more about Bettina Wind’s practice, and Third Angel at BAC.

One tip - The Mews is powered by a single generator, so evening events get cold as cold. Worth shivering for, the last and possibly most surreal performance of the evening took place out in the mews itself, on a stage built of wooden palettes and with a perfectly framed backdrop of the Gherkin, poised between two brick walls. Adam Latham and Rich Cash played a mournful three-minute tune with their band, each wearing a hand-drawn paper mask, with the drone of the generator behind them and clouds of stage smoke pumping out in front. All this, dramatically lit by the headlights of a parked car. One played the double bass, another was on the accordion and I’m sure there was a tambourine in there too. Watch recordings of similarly glorious performances by the band.

Next up, showing for two days only – don’t miss The Mews co-founders’ joint exhibition MIKAEL LARSSON - CARLOS NORONHA FEIO, 20- 21 March 2010.

- Lily Hall