Rut Blees Luxemburg — London Dust — Dominique Fiat Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 12 → December 21, 2013

For her fourth solo exhibition at the Gallery Dominique Fiat, Rut Blees Luxemburg introduces her new series London Dust which looks at the City of London, the financial centre of the capital that is currently undergoing rapid transformation.

Photography plays an important yet ambivalent role in this transformation; it is utilised by architects and property developers to create “computer generated visualisations” to seduce and sell their version of the future city. These photographic renderings are displayed on a large scale in the public space, where their shiny and convincing presence oscillates between promise and despair.

London Dust focuses on one of those future buildings, titled The Pinnacle. Designed with an ornamental flourish worthy of the Arabian fantasy backdrops of early Alexander Korda films, this future apex of London is an alluring image. Yet the site has only reached the 7th storey instead of the projected height of 300 metres. However, the building site, in its current state of entropy, gives presence to another form of seduction: the seduction of matter, of base material, here represented by the plumb and dumb sack of building sand, that affirmatively pushes itself lasciviously between the viewer and the image.

In Rut Blees Luxemburg’s photographs, images are disrupted by the marks of time — the ubiquitous and deadly dust and the excessive glare of the urban light. Before the image can become a fake allegory announcing a surface future, the present interrupts it — with its material and joyously filthy reality.

Born in Germany, Rut Blees Luxemburg is a London based photographer whose large-scale works explore the public spaces of the city. She creates immersive and vertiginous compositions that challenge established urban perceptions and brings to light the overlooked, the dismissed and the unforeseen. Rut Blees Luxemburg’s photographs have been exhibited internationally and are in many public collections including the Tate Modern, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia, CNAP and the Centre Georges Pompidou. Rut Blees Luxemburg is a Reader in Urban Aesthetics at the Royal College of Art, London.