If you drop by the Hackney Downs station you'll find Banner Repeater - Ami Clarke's site specific project comprised of exhibitions, events, lectures, commissioned artist residencies and performances. It's notoriously difficult to secure back up from the council, so Clarke's takeover of a disused space in the station is particularly welcoming

Initiated by Ami Clarke – a recent MA Fine Art graduate at CSM – Banner Repeater opened in September 2010, as a reading room and project space opened on Platform 1 of the station in September, this year.
 
 Like many other artists-led projects in the area, Banner Repeater (BR) secured its home in a disused shop space on the station. But while artists and collectives in East London have been making great use of empty shop space for a while now, BR has been one of the first to open with some assistance from Hackney Council. And so far, the Art in Empty Spaces scheme has legitimised the use of 4 disused properties for temporary, cultural activity by assisting local artists and curators in occupying vacant commercial spaces within the borough.
 
 “The project came about by my waiting on the platform for trains, looking into the two empty rooms for a year or so before the Empty Shop Fund scheme was announced at a serendipitous moment and after applying successfully, we also secured some Arts Council funding” explains Ami Clarke. “We have a steady footfall of approximately 200 people a week and have had some amazing feedback from visitors. I have seen an incredibly broad demographic of people visiting, and we are beginning to see signs of becoming a destination”
 
 And with place so integral to the project, the unusual location of Banner Repeater has been seems particularly relevant. Open to catch commuters during both the morning and evening rush hours, and having taken its name from railway signalling equipment, Banner Repeater has become very much, a site-specific project, as Ami points out, “location is integral to the project, deliberately sited at the incidental interstice the railway provides, it allows for the distribution and dissemination of material, connecting with the city, the underground network, overground to East Anglia, and potentially internationally via Stansted airport.”
 
 The sited nature of the space itself is also visible in the programme at Banner Repeater. Comprised of exhibitions, events and lectures, as well as commissioned artist residences and performances around ideas of the diagram, the programme has been presented within not just the gallery context, but also within a reading room and experimental project space. Home to the Publish and be Damned public library and holding a collection of printed artist’s material, the use of all three spaces has enabled a more collaborative, participatory and intellectually vigorous approach as Ami explains, “I am motivated to consider the project space in the sense of the potential critical framework that this might provide and keen to draw attention to concerns that might exist outside of the gallery space whilst operating within this framework: the location provides an ideal site for this.”
 
 The next exhibition at Banner Repeater will be Light Writing – a programme of artist’s film and video. Part of an event-based research project into the relationship between word and image in experimental film and video, led by Dr Duncan White based at British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, CSM.


 LIGHT WRITING
 3 December 2010 - 23 January 2011.
 Artists: Steven Ball, Ian Breakwell & Mike Leggett, Steve Hawley, Louis Henderson, David Lamelas, Laure Prouvost, Richard Serra, Erica Scourti, John Smith, Pete Spence, Maria Theodoraki and Ryszard Wasko.
 Curated by Duncan White and Steven Ball.