New commission for the Whitechapel - Andrew Pierre Hart

A new commission from London-based interdisciplinary artist and experimental music producer Andrew Pierre Hart, who explores connections between sound and painting, while also drawing on Whitechapel’s longstanding history as a home for migrant and diasporic communities.

 

Hart has created an ambient environment that features a site-specific mural, a series of six new oil paintings, a bamboo sculpture, a new sound composition and a film shot in the streets around the Whitechapel Gallery area. The sound composition, which can be felt physically through a speaker system embedded in a seating structure, forms the soundtrack for a new film titled Free Writers, which shows three dancers who navigate the gallery and surrounding streets, interpreting the area through their movements.

 

Sound also inflects the abstract and undulating forms that feature in both the large mural and smaller paintings. Hart describes these works as capturing ‘the quotidian rhythm of Whitechapel… its vibrant rumble and dissonant past’. Other paintings portray individuals who live and work locally.

 

Placed in front of the mural is a tower-like sculpture made of black bamboo, a material widely used in Africa for construction projects.  The provisional form of the structure resonates with the temporary stalls created by Whitechapel’s market traders, while its vertical and diagonal trusses rhyme with the geometric mural design behind.

 

Andrew Hart: Bio-Data Flows and Other Rhythms – A Local Story is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, featuring contributions by Hart, artist Larry Achiampong, writer Allie Biswas, and the exhibition curators, Gilane Tawadros and Cameron Foote.