An installation of large-scale prints by Derek Besant, exploring urban redevelopment and upheaval, plus films by Jayne Wilson and mixed media work by Pete Marsh.

Canadian artist Derek Besant is inspired by his travels to large cities, where he discovers the drama, chaos and mystery within building sites. Jayne Wilson makes short films about technology, engineering, timekeeping and magic.

The work of Derek Besant is themed around core redevelopment and upheaval within several large cities, and the temporary state of chaos that results in the streets. Based on photographs taken of building sites in Budapest, Vienna, London, Toronto, Mexico City, Calgary and Shanghai, the images of these cities’ infrastructures reveal them to be complex narratives embedded in space and time.

Each of these cities has been undergoing major demographic and structural shifts, and these changes have had a knock on effect upon the flow of traffic and pedestrians and patterns of social interaction. Returning to each city at various intervals, the artist discovers that many of the original configurations he photographed have been dug up, covered over, or replaced by new, unfamiliar structures. Cities are continually excavating the past and dismantling the present.

Besant looks upon these events as theatrical interventions or temporary acts in which people reorganize materials and space into and out of chaos. Pedestrians view the scenes through scaffolding, wire fences and traffic; piles of bricks, coils of electrical cable and concrete bags become the props.

The images in the exhibition, created using industrial printing processes onto veil-like scrims, expose aspects of the city which, by their very ubiquity, usually go unnoticed. Occasionally these sites capture our attention, and we get a fleeting glimpse of the city’s underbelly. Then we see what is happening in the streets of every city, even this one.

Alongside this is a screening of Jayne Wilson’s two short films from a series about the power of the past. offers an observation on our contemporary malady of supposed urgency, using the imagery of clocks and timekeeping. Hey Presto! reflects upon engineering, technology, time and magic, agents of change in the modern world.

Saturday 11 February – Sunday 25 March (Wednesday–Sunday)
11am–5pm
Phoenix Brighton, 10-14 Waterloo Place, BN2 9NB
All ages
FREE


Brown Site, Green Site Workshop
See the city bloom as you create an urban paradise in a box that lights up. Free drop-in workshop with Same Sky.

Thursday, 16 February
11am – 4pm (drop in)
All ages
FREE


Broken Ground Symposium: How do we experience the city?
See dedicated page for details