CTY brings together a large selection of Antony Cairns’ oeuvre from his various cities/projects in London, Las Vegas, Tokyo and Osaka, (including LDN3, LDN4, LPT and OSC), interspersed with 6 texts by Simon Baker (senior curator of photography, TATE). Each text takes a quote as starting point from authors including JG Ballard, William Gibson, HP Lovecraft and Benjamin Péret to introduce themes of urban life and urbanisation, including Drowned City, Ruined City, Abstract City and Endless City. Antony Cairns (b.1980) has used the city and urban development as an ostensible subject and engages deeply with the history of the photographic medium, experimenting printing methods and the aesthetics of abstraction. He has evolved a unique and distinctive oeuvre that reanimates historical processes and repurposes old technologies in new and unexpected ways, always through a keen focus on urban topographies and unrelenting built-up environments that visually recall the dystopian worlds of science-fiction. The ingenuity and originality of his work has garnered much critical attention; he was awarded the prestigious Hariban Award in 2015, and has been featured in international festivals and institutional exhibitions, most recently in A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age at the George Eastman Museum in New York. In 2017 he will be included in the Tate Modern exhibition Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art.
