LEITH DOCKS: Retrospective
The Honourable K.W. Harman | Ltd Ink Corporation
Working in a wealth of media, including sculpture, painting, photography, installation and performance, Kevin Harman has created a situationist experience that forces his audience to confront our society's harshest realities and untruths.
Notions of authorship, ownership and power structures pulsate through the veins of the exhibition. Harman has long provoked the art world, finding early recognition whilst still a student at Edinburgh College of Art when he put a scaffolding pole through the window of a (forewarned) Edinburgh art gallery (Brick 2009) who chose to prosecute. The artist continues to challenge and reappropriate institutional power in Website Projects (2016-17), a series of new online works. Using the internet-ether of pixels and code as (im)materials, credibility is crowd-sourced in this universally live web of artworks. These new online works seem especially auspicious in this time of digital rights and Internet privacy debates.
Visitors to the exhibition will be forced to navigate choreographed chaos as an army of disembodied rioters charge towards smashed windows found on the streets of Edinburgh; relics of violent acts unleashed by public anger. Fascinated by the criminal evidence left in the wake of civil disobedience, windows, particularly broken ones, carry huge significance for the artist.
Being Homeless is Hard, Having a Hoose is Harder (2017) ensures that averting our eyes to the plight of the homeless is not an option. Harman worked with bespoke rug maker Luke Irwin to translate homeless signs from his collection of almost 200, into two luxury domestic rugs, completing his collection of sumptuous home furnishings printed with the pleas of the homeless produced with Atholl Macfarlane of Remus Interiors.
CoBe.co (2017) is an online emotional galaxy: its stars are borne from participant’s confessions, real moments of human fear, frustration and doubt. Marrying the physical and the intangible, CoBe.co begins within a traditional, ornate confessional booth handcrafted by vulnerable adults supported by Grassmarket Community Projects. The booth provides visitors with an intimate, safe space in which to release their anxieties. These recorded admissions then enter an ever-expanding state of Collective Being (CoBe.co) online.
If inhibitions need shedding before stepping inside Harman’s confessional, EAF 2014’s Steak and Absinthe Bar, renamed A-Bar, returns for one night only. Housing the cross-pollination of ideas between carousing customers, whilst attending to the most primal of human needs (food, drink and contact) are still the primary aims but not Harman’s only intentions. He also sets out to foreground the transactions that take place, examining the different shapes that investment in the arts can take.
In the colossal space of 31 Bath Road, Leith Docks, Ltd Ink Corporation illuminates the plight of others whilst serving as a timely reminder of the tightrope we walk to maintain the status quo. Visitors will be forced to confront their own precarious positions, questioning the truths we take for granted.
