Urban Networks

Franko B, Keith Bates, Sophie Beard, Eva Bensasson, Mel Bochner, Leigh Bowery, David Cotterrell, Jeremy Deller, Clancy Gebler Davis, Valeria Graziano, Fergus Greer, Tom Ellis, Zarah Hunt, Zoe Irvine, Melanie Jackson, Manali Jagtap, Isaac Julien, Michael Landy, Ryan S Lemke, Piers Lockwood, Melanie Manchot, Fabian Monheim, Genesis P-Orridge, Magdalena Pederin, Colin Ray, Martha Rosler, Frances Scott, John Sheehy, Yinka Shonibare, Allyson Waller, Michael Wesley, Wrights and Sites, Catherine Yass

Urban Networks is an exhibition that charts the city as a social and physical experience. The work is grouped under four categories of encounter. Routes explores how we convey ourselves through the urban space. Sites examines the personality that is assumed by concrete structures in a city landscape. Groups is a series of works that conflate identity through collective and synchronised creativity. Positions surveys more subjective readings of the urban experience. Within the website each category is coupled with a spotlight text. These vary in format: Toby Litt was commissioned to write a short story and Genesis P-Orridge gave an interview; Sue Walkers essay concerns the contemporary practise of homeless artists, whilst Lucy Bradnock meditates on memory and migration.

Many of the pieces in this show were selected in respect to their awareness of the writing of history: Isaac Juliens Undressing Icons cruises for forgotten history in the gay community of the Harlem Renaissance; Leigh Bowery, in the images constructed by Fergus Greer, echoes William Hogarths print series A Harlots Progress. The weaving on the loom of history with the thread of the here and now evident in such works is echoed in the original premise of this exhibition; to create a show in the eighteenth-century home of the Courtauld Institute of Art that engages the building with its urban surroundings and the contemporary situation of its viewers. Hidden within the exhibition are the chains of communication and friendship that have been forged in organising and facilitating this show. The collection was picked out by a variously shifting group of about twelve people who sat and talked about art and the logistics of hanging an exhibition every Tuesday for around seven months. Each voice that entered that arena has contributed to the collection and influenced the way we think about it. The invaluable support provided by the staff of the Institute and Gallery, the generosity of artists and their dealers, the dedication of designers and the expertise of professionals who hung, packed and transported the art itself, are just some of the skills, work and advice which people gave to make this show possible and which warrants our unfaltering gratitude.