exhibition

Whitechapel Laboratory - Langlands & Bell

Langlands & Bell

31.Oct.07 - 07.Dec.07
Wed-Sun 11-6
£ a advance

Whitechapel Gallery
80-82 Whitechapel High St
London E1 7QX
info 020 7522 7878 / enq 020 7522 7888
info@whitechapel.org
www.whitechapel.org
Tube Aldgate East, Aldgate, Spitalfields / Brick Lane

British artists Langlands & Bell have been collaborating since the late 1970s, their cross media practice including sculpture, photography, film, video, architecture and most recently innovative digital and interactive technology. Their work examines our relationship with our immediate built environment and, on a wider global level, the coded systems of mass-communications and exchange used to negotiate an increasingly fast-changing technological world.

Since the 1990s, the artists have been examining a different type of architecture; the abbreviations and acronyms used by a range of international organisations to position themselves globally. From the acronyms used by museums, international airports, NGOs, internet domain names and terrorist groups the artists have created, using digital animation, a form of ‘concrete poetry’; a language of codes that is instantly reassuring and recognisable yet unsettling in its relentless, formulaic homogeneity.

The Whitechapel also presents The House of Osama Bin Laden, 2003, an interactive 3-part multi-media installation made by the artists following a visit to Afghanistan in 2002. In this award-winning work they reflect on the aftermath of ‘the war on terror’ and the remnants of both Western and al-Qaeda intervention in the landscape of post 9/11 Afghanistan.