Text by Rupert Galea
A network of tunnels and cloisters underneath the St Pancras Parish Church serves as the final resting place for 557 people. Since 2002 it has become a transitory point of interaction for artists from countless cultures and disciplines, their works enacting a temporary negotiation with a structure that otherwise symbolises permanence in its purest form.
The sober, history-drenched aura of this underground complex lends itself to quiet meditations on the self, the unknown and the ever-elusive human experience. It is the intention of the Temporary Media Collective to explore and chart these interzonal pathways through listening. Their exhibition counter-mapping sets out to recast our often-overlooked aural perception as the central mediator through which we consider and question our surroundings.
Formed during their time together at UAL, Temporary Media Collective manifests at the intersection of nine artists’ backgrounds, perceptions and approaches to creating art. Harnessing the cryptic (no pun intended) metaphysical nature of our relationship with vibrations in the air is the paintbrush of choice this group uses to redraw the zones and cells of our experienced spatiality and engage with the peripheries and transversal lines that we are limited in our interaction with using only our eyes.
Among the artists involved are Stella Chin-Ting Yang, a Taiwanese observationist whose works decipher the role and possibilities of an artist within cultural-social frameworks, Ilya Gurin-Babayeu, an experimental electronic musician from Belarus grappling with perception and tacit knowledge through auditory aesthetics, Derby-born Martyn Riley, a multidisciplinary artist working with imprints of the memory relating to found objects, locational imagery and the aerographic, and Rupert Galea, a Maltese-Irish digital artist operating in the emergence of patterns and cognition of the uncanny in seemingly chaotic and disconnected sonic and visual forms.
Through a series of installations and performances, The Crypt Gallery is serving not only as a vessel for these sonic explorations but as an echo chamber that highlights the bleeding at the edges inhabited by the material dimensions of the works. There is a certain uncanny contrast contained in the dialogue between the placid stasis of death the space was built around and the symphony of resonances bouncing off the walls.
The exhibition takes place from 9 to 11 February, with a private viewing taking place on Thursday 8 and an evening of performances from select artists on Saturday 10.
Find more information here and on the Temporary Media Collective Instagram page.
