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The Invisible City

Group show at The Photographers’ Gallery. 1990
Date: 19 October, 1990 until 1 November, 1990
Curator: David Chandler
Organiser: London Project II/The Photographers’ Gallery

The Invisible City was an exhibition that took place at The Photographers’ Gallery, in late 1990. It featured contributions by Alison Marchant, Sonia Boyce, Lea Andrews, Simon Crump, and Crispin Hughes & Chris Boot. It was the second London Project exhibition, and was referred to as London Project II. The exhibition was curated by David Chandler, who provided the catalogue’s Introduction essay. Wrote Chandler, “The contemporary city has become a coagulation of vast indexes of images and information, both mental and electronic, each with a different emphasis, a different code of reference. As Paul Virilio has said, ‘ the way one gains access to the city is no longer through a gate, an arch of triumph, but rather through an electronic audiencing system, whose users are not so much inhabitants or privileged residents, as they are interlocutors in permanent transit.”

It is from this ‘shifting perceptual field’ that this exhibition sets out to revisit what Jonathan Raban once called ‘the soft city’ - a city made from complex network of human relationships and individual experiences, a city built around the physical and psychological terrains mapped out by its inhabitants. This is ‘the city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare… as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.’ “