Migration-Hamburg 2005
Exhibition of London Metropolitan students at Galerie VORT ORT in Hamburg

Press Release
Galerie VOR ORT presents the exhibition ‘Besucher/Visitors’, which showcases the work of five current students and recent graduates from London Metropolitan University. This exhibition forms the second leg of a Partnership project with the Hochschule für bildende Künste, which saw artists from Hamburg selected by Wiebke Siem, exhibiting in London at Unit 2 Gallery. The work by the London-based ‘visitors’ is marked by an emphasis on heterogeneity and encompasses Photography, Drawing, Film, Video-Installation and Interactive Soundwork. Selected by the curator Nicolas de Oliveira, the exhibition displays different attitudes of making and viewing. It emphasises the role of the spectator in the process of reception. The traditional contemplative stance is followed by close engagement and scrutiny and finally by interaction - where the artist simply provides the instrument for the viewer to make the work.

Mary Yacoob’s drawings record incidental and typically overlooked occurrences. Habitual behaviour, chance events, and experiments concerning domestic routines are notated in charts and maps. Scientific methods and visual languages are appropriated and used as structures within which to observe and note, to search for the poetic in the everyday or to suggest narratives.
Large colour Photographs depicting decaying industrial buildings form the nucleus of Michael Vogt’s work. Influenced by the Typologies of Hilla and Bernd Becher, and the early architectural photography of Gursky, Ruff, Struth, Hütte and Höfer, these exhausted remains of the machine age speak of a nostalgia for a recent past, and of the inextricably enmeshed social, political and environmental legacies projected into the present.
Lewis Cuthbert-Ashton’s films examine the progressive breakdown of human relationships under extraordinary conditions. His dialogue infuses everyday conversation with dark humour and menace. The absurd scenarios point to the inevitability of violence and result in tragic consequences.
Joe Watling combines video and sound to highlight our perception of time. The spatial quality of his installations, both physical and acoustic, is intended to cause the moving image to be considered in terms of object and location as opposed to a traditional screen-based representation of another time and space.
Merijn Royaards’s work examines the acoustic properties of urban spaces and its relationship to the human sensory experience. The work presented here consists of a modified drum kit, which replaces areas of impact with touch-microphones, and invites participants to create a sound ambient within the space.