Curators: Lynn MacRitchie, Denizhan Özer
Artists: Lynn MacRitchie, Denizhan Özer, Alexey Moskvin, Lütfi Özden
The title of this exhibition suggests many things – a myth, a goal, an aspiration a hope. For the world’s cities these metaphors are also actual places. Now, for the first time in history, urban dwellers outnumber those living in the countryside. As skyscapers and shanty towns spread across the globe, cities start to resemble each other ever more, swallowing the individual in the anonymity of vast crowds.
The Golden City is a seven-screen video installation filmed in the heart of the city of London. Filmed in 2008, the video was finished just as the economic crisis began, so its powerful images of London’s financial centre being washed away immediately became prophetic of the economic collapse which has now engulfed the world.
The two Turkish artists in the exhibition, Denizhan Ozer and Lutfi Ozden, reveal another side to city life. Ozer’s photographs and Ozden’s paintings show the city as a dark and threatening place, a hostile environment that does not welcome those who have come there, often from very far away, to seek their fortunes. Despite its threatening exterior, however, the city does become their home, a subject examined by the fourth artist in the exhibition, the London-based Russian photographer Alexey Moskvin. His video, shot in London, St Petersburg and Colombia, shows how the notion of home persists, no matter how far away it may be. At the heart of each video sequence, changing models of houses, symbols of home, appear and disappear, fading into and out of sight as the scenes of country and city, departure and arrival, scroll on continuously behind.
The Golden City exhibition brings together artists from the UK, Turkey and Russia in an examination of the role of the city in modern life, whether as centre of wealth, heart of darkness or simply home.