Birthday Exhibition

Here's the latest project from artist Sam Winston...

Birthday Exhibition - Southbank Centre
27 January 2012, 10am - 29 January 2012, 11pm
Royal Festival Hall - Cloakroom Lobby - Level 1

The installation forms part of The Southbank Centre’s ‘Death - A Festival For The Living’ in which The Southbank Centre takes a look at how culture can provide an essential role in helping us under- stand and come to terms with this unknowable certainty.

  Photography Andy Sewell

Here's a description about the installation:
Try bringing to mind four friends, simultaneously, within the space of a second. If you managed that then you’re getting close to imagining how many people are being born onto the planet right now.

So why is it when we hear such information we are usually awed by the scale at which it’s happening yet somehow that very information soon becomes another piece of trivia?  It’s a question artist Sam Winston has been working on for a few years and in collaboration with The Southbank Centre he’s proposing an experiment.

“What if we took certain statistics - like the ones close to our hearts , say our birth and death rates - and literally tried recording each birth or death with a drawn circle - how long would it take to portray 12 hours of life on our planet?
For the work I am inviting people to the Royal Festival Hall to register a birth or death by drawing a circle to celebrate one of the 1/4 of a million lives that come and go every day. This in turn sits beside a wall of names registering these birth and deaths.

  Photography Andy Sewell

The effect is a transformation of a seemingly incomprehensible statistic into a very real sea of 260,082 brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers. And this is an invitation for people to partake in that.”
Sam Winston is creating a pop up registry office in Royal Festival Hall commemorating the quarter of a million lives that are born and die in the space of 12 hours around the world.
http://ticketing.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/hayward-gallery-and-visual-arts/tickets/birthday-1000190

Here's a short film that he's made:
http://youtu.be/GycPPNtRy9U?hd=1

There's no plug for our paper here as he's not using our Colorset (well not as far as I know!) although I have worked with Sam before and he's an interesting artist producing these thought provoking works.
www.samwinston.com

Posted by Justin Hobson 17.01.2012