[in]visible city

About

[in]visible city is a pattern of 11 art interventions within the urban fabric of Somers Town. The exhibition spans artists from Dorset, Glasgow, London and Nottingham and includes works by Luke Raphael Andrew, Anaïs Comer, María Camila Cepeda Gnecco, Pip Denham, Maya Rose Edwards, Katharina Fitz, Hongyu Luo, Owl Call Radio, Salvi De Sena, Katherine Smith and Bethany Ellen Walker. Presented in the UK Mexican Arts Society; The Cock Tavern; local shops and cost-cutters; ‘Fine Tutors’ building remains and hoarding around its construction site; Oakshott Court Social Housing; Chalton Street & Phoenix Rd Crossroad; local telephone booths; these ‘art injections’ trace the signs dwelling [in]visible organism of Somers Town.​

A precious ‘cultural cradle’, Somers Town is home to writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft who died there in 1797 after giving birth to Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Charles Dickens, who briefly lived in this area as a child, commemorated Somers Town in The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist. Nowadays, enclosed in between major developments of Kings Cross and Euston, Somers Town is a sacred environment cherishing community and locality – an [in]visible unique organism entangled within the global body. 

Drawing inspiration from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the theme of this exhibition is not the ‘city’ exactly but what is inside and round about it. [in]visible city imagines urban fabric as an inventory or rather as an invention constituted from memories, times, languages, people, events, sounds, moments. Enveloping and nourishing each other, these elements form an intercorporeal being - a presumptive realm of the tangible and visible, which extends beyond the things we touch and see at present.

Curated by Olga Tarasova.