Alberta Pane gallery is pleased to present Anthropo-Scene a new exhibition by the

British artist Gayle Chong Kwan.

The title Anthropo-Scène refers to a 2015 exhibition at the Bloomberg space in London as part of the program « The Homecoming”. The Homecoming selected four artists’ projects exploring the story and the architecture of the city of London.

Gayle Chong Kwan’s ‘Anthropo-scene’ is a multi-layered installation that explores the built environment, strata and waste, in relation to the City of London.

Fantastical large wall-based photographic panoramas are created from London’s

lost buildings and contemporary waste. Installations in the gallery recall stacks of

archaeological drawers. The photographic and sculptural elements range in ratio

and scale. Chong Kwan brings together contemporary, historic and archaeological

objects and materials, juxtaposing excavation and construction, ruin and

renewal, and confounding their chronology in order to question what we leave to posterity.

Chong Kwan explores different landscape ‘scenes’ in terms of staging the view,

as well as the place, where an action or event occurs. In 2002, Paul Crutzen, the

Nobel Prize-winning chemist, suggested that due to increased human population

and economic activity we have left the Holocene and entered a new geological

epoch. In 2008, a proposal was made to the Stratigraphy Commission of the

Geological Society of London to make Anthropocene a formal unit of geological

epoch division. This shift in the relationship between humanity and nature

further complicates distinctions between artificial and natural, and real and

imaginary-questions raised by Chong Kwan‘s installation.

The works in ‘Anthropo-scene’ assert the importance of waste in giving measure

to our lives. Waste is not just ‘matter out place’, a definition first given by Lord

Palmerston in the mid-nineteenth century, it forms a denigrated, subordinate

position within a spatial taxonomy dominated by binaries–clean and dirty, wanted and rejected, inside and outside.