Out of the Ruins of the Real...

01.Dec.06 - 14.Jan.07
Wed-Sat 10-6

Seventeen
17 Kingsland Rd
London E2 8AA
020 7729 5777
dave@seventeengallery.com
www.seventeengallery.com
Tube Old Street, Liverpool Street, Shoreditch / Hoxton

'Our definition of play is to deliberately break the rules and invent our own, thus freeing creative activity from restrictions, to redesign aesthetic and revolutionary actions that undermine or elude social control.' (CutUp, 2006)

CutUp are a London based group of artists linked by a shared desire to reorder the urban landscape through intervention and play. CutUp’s practice incorporates collage, film and installation and focuses largely on the creative potential of the street as a site for interventionist art and disruption.

CutUp’s belief in utilising existing materials from the street, has led to works manifesting themselves as the re-ordering of advertising posters and street furniture, without adding anything new – recycling what was there already. Interested in the idea of the ‘street as a stage’ for intervention or creative activity as determined by Walter Benjamin and later the Situationists, the collective aims to introduce elements of disquiet into the urban everyday.

For their second exhibition at SEVENTEEN, CutUp’s sites for intervention are again brought into the gallery space, temporarily, before returning to the street. The exterior of the gallery will be boarded up, and the boards perforated by drilling, creating imagery through the dispersion of light from within. The interior of the gallery will house a wooden, cubic structure, echoing the exterior it is also pierced. Inside the box is a new film projection, in which a four-sided tower of drilled boards is at first illuminated and then consumed by a fire started in its centre. Around this structure sit a number of new collaged and re-ordered advert works, housed in light boxes, and the gallery is dominated by a new sound installation. The show extends further outside the gallery space in the form of CutUp’s outdoor interventions on the streets of London, which have already started to appear, and should endure after the show closes.

CutUp live and work in London. Recent projects include Satellites, curated by i-cabin at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, La Vida Te Espera at NIU Gallery, Barcelona.