"liminal" Photography Exhibition

An exhibition of urban cultures and spaces as seen through the lenses of 25 London-based contemporary photographic artists will be hosted from 27 September to 3 October in Shop 14 of The Old Truman Brewery. Bringing together multidisciplinary backgrounds and diverse approaches to visual urbanism, the members of the newly-founded collective Urban Tracers join forces to examine key debates in visual sociology. In conversation with the framework developed by Goldsmith’s international MA in Photography and Urban Cultures, Urban Tracers invite the audience to witness the city’s liminalities whilst suggesting new perspectives from which to view and experience the flow and flux of urban life.

Urban Tracers travel between cities; they move inside them; they use maps, or simply wander about; they walk, or use public transportation; they stay outdoors, or go into people’s homes and workplaces; they talk and they listen, or they quietly observe; they see things sometimes in colour, sometimes in monochrome; sometimes at day, sometimes at night. They use their cameras to capture what is there, what was there, what will be there. They wear their masks while they wish to unveil others. Urban Tracers (ex)change personas and find themselves dancing and performing with others. They create auto-ethnographies, investigate psychogeographies and try to rewrite what was effaced on the palimpsests: ruins; memories; mourning; monuments. Urban Tracers are looking for the contemporary city dweller’s identity by addressing issues of gender, sexuality, migration, domesticity and class. They photograph people on the streets and on night-buses, while they themselves use the streets and night-buses. They document night workers, when they themselves have to work at night to make their documentation. They capture the images of the elements that make a migrant feel ‘at home’ in London, when they themselves come from foreign lands. They are visually interested in a culturally diverse community, when they themselves constitute such diversities. The Urban Tracers flirt persistently with the spatial and temporal dimensions of liminality and bring to light more and more of its applications in the urban scenery.

Urban Tracers is a group of photographic artists consisting of the most recent graduates from the MA in Photography and Urban Cultures program at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Featured artists include: Ching-Fu Ho, Claire Levy, Cliff Davidson, Danyang Hong, David Jackson, Despina Alexandrou, Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson, Jack Goffe, Jiwon Kim, Jiwon Yoon, Johannes Rigal, Joung Im Ku, Khobir Abdul, Lene Hald, Marianna Psara, Michael Frank, Sarah Louise Fowler, Shantala Fels, Sylvia Babke, Tomoko Kinoshita, Vrinda Seksaria, Yana Demi, Yanni Eleftherakos, Zaira La Ragione