Photo: Above Ground Studio.
This new commission from London-based interdisciplinary artist and experimental music producer Andrew Pierre Hart draws on Whitechapel’s longstanding history as a home for migrant and diasporic communities and continues the artist’s interest in exploring connections between sound and painting.
Presented here are a sound composition, a film shot in the streets surrounding Whitechapel Gallery, a series of six new oil paintings, a site-specific mural and a bamboo sculpture. The sound composition, which can be felt physically through a speaker system embedded in a seating structure, forms the soundtrack for the film. This features three dancers who navigate the gallery and surrounding streets, interpreting the area through their movements.
Sound also inflects the abstract and undulating forms that feature in both the large mural and smaller paintings. Hart describes these works as capturing ‘the quotidian rhythm of Whitechapel… its vibrant rumble and dissonant past’.
Other paintings portray individuals who live and work locally. Placed in front of the mural is a tower-like sculpture made of black bamboo, a material widely used in Africa for construction projects. The tower’s vertical and diagonal trusses echo the geometric mural design, while its provisional form resonates with the temporary stalls created by Whitechapel’s market traders: gathering places for conversation, friendship and community.
Andrew Hart: Bio-Data Flows and Other Rhythms – A Local Story is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, featuring contributions by Hart, artist Larry Achiampong, writer Allie Biswas, and the exhibition curators, Gilane Tawadros and Cameron Foote.
Free
Opening hours
Tue – Sun: 11.00 – 18.00
Location:
77-82 Whitechapel High St
London, E1 7QX
Text and pictures, copyright whitechapel gallery and the artist