Anthony Luvera: Taking Place

About

Artist Anthony Luvera has collaborated with individuals who have experienced homelessness in cities and towns across the UK for over fifteen years. Through this process, Luvera collated thousands of photographs, videos, sound recordings and texts, created with or by participants. These works tell stories about individual experiences, and the systems and services that shape people’s everyday lives.

Anthony Luvera: Taking Place, curated by Futurecity, presents two bodies of work: Photographs from Assembly (2013 – 2014) and responses from Frequently Asked Questions (2014 – ongoing).

For Assembly, commissioned by Brighton Photo Fringe, Luvera invited individuals associated with the area’s First Base Day Centre and the Phase One Project to create photographs and sound recordings of the places, people and events that captivated them. Eventually, some of those participants worked with Luvera on the development of Assisted Self-Portraits. The photographs that resulted have been framed and edited with collaboration from their protagonists, upending the traditional photography process and empowering the portraitist themselves.

Frequently Asked Questions is a research work that focuses on the impact of homelessness at the national level, demonstrating the true scale of the crisis through an individual’s navigation of bureaucratic and depersonalising centres of authority. Stemming from a parallel enquiry conducted over the past five years with Gerald Mclaverty, a participant of Assembly, it presents responses from 110 local authorities across the UK, based on questions arising from Gerald’s own experience of homelessness.

Anthony Luvera’s work invites you to consider the narratives and dimensions that can be shared through a collaborative approach to creating art. In this bookstore, stories take place across six floors. Taking Place gives agency to Luvera’s collaborators, their lives and the stories they have to tell.