Passengers

Passengers is a site-specific exhibition series conceived and curated by Julie F Hill that explores the historical, social and material contexts of various sites and architecture. For its inaugural series artists presented work that explored the real and imaginative associations of The Brunswick Centre – a Modernist, mixed residential and commercial development in Bloomsbury, London – which is als

o our headquarters. The series has since expanded to include off-site exhibitions, residencies and publications. The title Passengers references the 1975 film The Passenger by Michelangelo Antonioni that features the Brunswick Centre as a location and exploits it as a powerful mise-en-scene. The plot follows a journalist who assumes the identity of a dead businessman while working on a documentary in Chad, unaware that he is impersonating an arms dealer with connections to the rebels in the current civil war. This notion of a ‘passenger’ as someone who inhabits transient identities and spaces, relates to how each artist is rendered a passenger within the larger exhibition structure. This structure is generative and multi-directional, allowing different ideas, themes and narratives to emerge, overlap and intersect, creating dialogue with each other over time. The Brunswick Centre is a grade II listed residential and shopping centre designed by Patrick Hodgkinson in the mid-1960s and has an interesting history. It’s often misinterpreted as a Brutalist megastructure and likened to a bunker or space-ship from sci-fi movie set – in contrast to the architect’s vision: ‘…it was to be a village, not a megastructure, and never ‘Brutalist’, but would rather create a poetic construct of feel and not look…’. Inspired by Existentialist philosophy, features such as the cascading glass facades of the ‘winter gardens’ were to give contemplative views of open skies ‘… allow[ing] an engagement with an existential awareness of self in the world.’

Our programme is run in collaboration with Gauld Architecture. The inaugural series was supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England

For all enquiries please contact:
Julie F Hill, Artist/Curator
[email protected]