calendario eventi  :: 

X

7/3/2012

Justin Coombes + Birdhead

Paradise Row, London

Birdhead

Paradise Row presents the first London solo show of Shanghai based photographic duo Birdhead.

Founded in 2004 and comprising Ji Weiyu (1980) and Song Tao (1979), Birdhead use photography to capture, mediate and occupy their contemporary experience of daily life in Shanghai, China's greatest metropolis whose ever increasing scale and vitality is more than itself - being read the world over as a gauge of the flow of power from West to East.

Their tactical use of the snapshot aesthetic and the high volume of images they deploy make manifest a visual stream of consciousness. We see the artists going about their lives; being with friends, laughing, talking, eating, working, partying, sleeping etc. all this against the backdrop of the urban landscape of Shanghai. Tall towers, skyscrapers, telecoms masts and vast flyovers punctuate the images of human activity, of youth and consumer culture, illustrating the strange symbiosis between inanimate infrastructure and the life that it shelters and facilitates.

Alongside their images, Birdhead present, Youth Does Not Know How Sorrow Tastes by Xin Qiji, a classic poem from the Song dynasty era. A melancholy masterpiece, the poem reflects upon the arc of experience that forms each life, the Romantic naiveté of youth and the price paid for wisdom. In common with Birdhead's sensibility, the poem is imbued with the pathos of the individual set against the sweep of historical time.

Birdhead's work is a vision of the contemporary sublime, being at once a mediation on and a product of the vastness of contemporary experience.

It was the struggle to comprehend and live with this overwhelming scale that was perhaps the fundamental drive of Modernism, a vastness that emerged with the birth of the modern city in all its complexities. As history replays itself in altered but familiar forms, culture follows suit.

Set within this historical moment Birdhead's work, in all its simplicity, is a key cultural and social document.

Birdhead's recent solo exhibitions include Birdhead: New Village at EX3 Centre for Contemporary Art in Florance, Artist File 2011 The NACT Annual Show of Contemporary Art at the National Art Centre Tokyo.

A major presentation by Birdhead featured in ILLUMinations in the Arsenale at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. Birdhead also participated in museum exhibitions including China Powerstation IV at Pinacoteca Agnelli in Torino, Italy, Warm Up at the Minshing Museum in Shanghai, Reversed Images, Representations of Shanghai and it's Contemporary Material Culture at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and China Power Station: Part II in the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo in Norway.

-----

Justin Coombes
Halcyon Song

'…ascend to a hard human parade of mind stealth; cold comfort knowledge; the vortex of the self.' From Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Text by Justin Coombes

In his second solo show at the gallery, Justin Coombes presents 'Halcyon Song', a series of photo-text vignettes. A halcyon is a mythical bird, often identified as a kingfisher, said to charm the wind and waves into calm from its floating nest. Fusing the fantastical and the everyday, Coombes' colourful, large format, panoramic photographs show the point of view of a female kingfisher as she searches for nesting sites along the length of London's Regents Canal. The pictures are accompanied by short poems in the form of wall texts that capture the bird's observations on her quest and her place in the wider world. In one image, a Chinese woman gazes inscrutably from a bridge. Others show a girl and boy stealing coots' eggs at night, and the kingfisher spying her own reflection as she flies past a barge's reversing mirror.

These new works develop Coombes's photographic aesthetic of the 'urban pastoral', and for the first time combine his own poetry with his photography to create a compelling productive tension.

Coombes has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. Collections include the Government Art Collection, Ernst and Young and the David Roberts Art Foundation. Numerous awards and grants include the Arts and Humanities Research Board, 2011. He is a PhD candidate in Fine Art by Practice at the Royal College of Art and a tutor at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford.

Private View: Thursday 8 March 2012, 7.00-9.00pm

Paradise Row
74 Newman Street London
Gallery hours: Mon - Fri : 11 am - 7 pm. Sat: 11am - 6pm
Admission free

stampa

permanent link