Local Anaesthesia

Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
6 May 2011 to 3 June 2011

The Desensitisation of the Urban Experience

Supported by ASC Studios

198 Contemporary Arts and Learning and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design BA (Hons) Criticism, Communication and Curation students present Local Anaesthesia an exhibition that explores our relationship with urbanisation by using the uncanny, the unsound and the rhetoric to expose the effects of city living. As art can be both local and global, this exhibition uses both proximity and distance in relation to London and its culture. Viewed in a wider context, it is not a visual hybrid of cities or homage to one, but an investigation into the desensitisation of the urban experience.

Tim Bouckley Conspiracy Dumpsters are urban interventions, in the shape of text taken from popular conspiracy films placed on bins around 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning and on the walls of the gallery space. These play on the question of our society’s belief in public notices, mixing entertainment with everyday objects. Larry Achiampong’s Standard! plays on our submissive behaviour towards figures of authority and stereotypes as well as the media’s percep¬tion and anxieties of Brixton and associations that are commonly linked with the area. Yu Kim Chan’s sculptures Your Sweet Terrorists, takes a familiar non-threatening toy and subtly changes our perceptions of roles and labels. Filling the space between urbanisation and globalisation is Hollington & Kyprianou’s A Future Manifest. Combining footage from 2010’s closure of Heathrow airport due to volcanic ash cloud, with a computerised narration of F.T Marinetti’s ‘Futurist Manifest’, A Future Manifest looks at the disruptive nature of globalisation, progression and its violent origins.