LIVING CITIES
The display at Tate Modern is a collection of a wide range of art works including sculpture, photographs, paintings from artists from Beirut, Cairo, Los Angeles and Ukrine. The collection is constitute with three rooms, the central room of Living Cities, the digital immersed room Explore Artists' Cities by Bloomberg Connects, and the Byker Series exhibition of photographs took by the Finnish born artist Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen. Each of these three parts working on different perspectives on how the artists view the modern cities and engaging with the cities in their own aesthetics.
In the Central Room for Living Cities, the artists draw their inspiration from modern cities all over the world, from general experience to specific and local touchstones. The artworks in the display date from the 1960s up to nowadays, exploring and experimenting on the artists past life and work on the cities they connected with. While the work of Bloomberg Connects, form a journey with artists from around the world to visit their artists' space and their experience in the cities. The videos goes on with the change of lighting in the room, created this interactive digital experience to connect with artists and their experiences. Different from the two, which created general images of different cities, the Byker Series contained images captured around Byker estate in Newcastle over twelve years. Through the pictures, revealed a corner of the life of those lived in the Byker estate.
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The use of technology - photography and video, enabled the remodeling to go back in time. Moreover, the roaming in the exhibition space of each audience member create a journey for individuals. The viewers could follow their own pace, joining into the artworks in their own way, and left with the freedom in imagination and interpretation.
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The key preoccupation of the collection for me, is that while walking in the display room, I personally feel connected to the images of the cities. It is the sense of living and the pathway of life as a human being in a city that touched me and made me feel familiar. It traced people's life through their interaction with the surroundings, then the photographs left the moment been restored. Which showed the relation between space, human and time. Reading the city on a personal level, thereby create comprehension of ourselves through a larger human scale.
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The Living Cities display inspired me to develop a different view on the most important figure in a city, its human. So I decided to use a montage of photographs I took in the past that could reflect on the life in cities in details, for examples pictures of passing crowd, taxis, view through a car window, a bird, etc. By doing so, to try to provoke personal memories and emotion from the audiences, creating nostalgia, and making connections between individuals to their living cities through the pictures. Although the choice of pictures might be too personal, since it would be mainly based on my experiences. It still reflecting on the relation between an individual person to a city.
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Photo Credit:
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​© Lee Mawdsley
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