25 St. James's Street
London  SW1A 1HG

Cleo Broda
Guides to The Economist Plaza

Cleo Broda  often creates maps or signage for a particular location.  Research for recent work has employed her rigorous,  if unorthodox, surveying technique. This entails loitering, chatting to strangers, taking photos, observing and following any line of enquiry which comes to mind or is suggested by others.

For The Economist Plaza, Broda has made a series of signs.  The signs mimic the type of signs one might expect to find in a plaza, but contain quite different information. The artist has asked a range of people to draw a guide to the complex shape of The Economist Plaza from memory.  Each of these memory-distorted images of the space is unique and is labelled with the author's name.  Placed on the Plaza, the signs give multiple and conflicting perceptions or readings of the site. 

Broda's main interest in representations of information such as maps, diagrams and signs is their subjectivity and partiality.  She is fascinated by authority that they seem to carry despite this, and hopes to disrupt our idea of what information is and whose version of it is important. The result is often something that offers alternative views of reality and lets us question our ideas of what important or useful information actually is. 

Recent projects are two Local Information Guides made for areas of London and Liverpool as part of  New Contemporaries 99. The Guides present an alternative view of the places in a familiar form and have the look of official information. The maps do not show road names, churches, post offices or tube stations but rather, have symbols for 'Rubbish likely to contain hair/cheese', 'Handy hole to push things down', 'Image of dog' and 'Popular place to pee'.

Broda completed a  Master of Fine Arts at The Slade in 1988 and has exhibited work in New Contemporaries 99 (in Liverpool Biennial and in London at Milch Gallery), at the Tramway in Glasgow and at Waygood in Newcastle.  Her most recent works are an artist's project published in Everything magazine and a piece for the exhibition DIY (London, September 2000).  Her work has been written about in Time Out and Third Text. She is currently showing You Are Here in Manchester and will shortly be starting a six month residency at The London School of Economics. 

Michael Pinsky
In Transit

'One measures the distances that effectively separate two regions of a city, distances that may have little relation with the physical distance between them.'  Guy Debord

People who live in large metropolitan cities have a unique sense of distance in relation to space.  A city is defined not by how far away destinations are, but how long it takes to reach that destination. The perceptions or urban residents are moulded by the way they travel: by foot, tube, bus, car, bicycle or motorbike. The accessibility of the city varies significantly depending on which mode of transport is used and which time of the day is chosen to travel. 

Through these shifting layers of communication the participant is constantly making choices as they race through the city, shaving seconds to release 'quality' time for work or leisure. It was argued by Guy Debord that '...we must replace travel as an adjunct to work with travel as pleasure.' Pleasure is created through a sense of choice. The Cartesian logic of the multi-paged A to Z or Harry Beck's reductionist tube map disenfranchises the populace. These blunt tools mobilise the public without giving information about relationships between areas within the city. 

Pinsky changes this perception of the city of London by creating maps for The Economist  that reflect travel time, disregarding geographical distance, mapping all modes of transport so comparisons can be made. These distorted maps are both subjective and entirely objective. They directly document the artist's journey through the city as as he tries to make sense of the network that all city dwellers are connected to for most of their lives, whether it is transport or other forms of communication such as the phone, email or mobile systems. 

Pinsky takes the combined roles of urban planner, activist, researcher, resident and artist to create an artwork or tool, which proposes greater transparency of the city's networks. This exhibition takes The Economist Building as the centre point of these maps. Reflecting this, the windows will become enlarged maps with the city as a backdrop. Video monitors will portray the artist's personal journey through the city at high speed and a three-dimensional map will reveal the differences between each mode of travel. 

Pinsky graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1995. His work explores relationships between architectural spaces and perceptions of time. Pinsky's most recent projects include; Transparent Room, a site-specific video installation touring the UK, funded by the Arts Council of England, Overload, an installation shown in Weimar and developed during residencies at the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM), Germany, and the Ecole d'Art d'Aix-en-Provence, France. From December 2000 Pinsky will be Artist-In-Residence at the V2 Lab for Unstable Technologies in Rotterdam. His work has featured in publications such as Creative Camera and The Guardian.

Current Exhibition

Forthcoming Exhibition