Glut: Images, Information and Excess at The Holden Gallery
Polly Checkland Harding
It’s a fairly self-explanatory title for an exhibition. Glut: Images, Information and Excess at The Holden Gallery is an artistic response to the proliferation of images in recent years; to statistics including that there are over 80m photographs uploaded to Instagram daily. The exhibition features six artists who are making creative use of this situation, with a particular focus on the cumulative effect of recorded images in the art works on show. Esther Hovers’ False Positives, for instance, uses a montage of photographs taken in Brussels to reflect on the increasing use of intelligent surveillance systems in public spaces, which are able to detect deviant behaviour; some natural, some staged, Hovers’ photographs are created by combining images from several minutes of video in which at least one example of deviant behaviour occurs.
Similarly, artist and writer James Bridle has focused on London’s CCTV – and particularly on the 20 square kilometres of the London congestion zone, in which he has attempted to photograph the nearly 700 cameras that monitor the area. Viktoria Binschtok’s Cluster Series, meanwhile, re-stages photographs that have come up in online searches related to her own work. Here again, the images are produced as a cluster, in a visual echo of the ‘glut’ that the exhibition’s title refers to.
Opening hours: 10am-4.30pm Mon-Fri; 10am-7pm Thur.
