Living London

For his first major solo exhibition, Gerry Fox will present Living London, a single work made up of a series of synchronised multiple screen film installations inspired by London. In the space of 30 minutes the work will take the viewer on a series of journeys through life, through London and through the restored Methodist Chapel of 176.

Fox's work presents a portrait of London and evokes the physical sensation of being immersed in a city's ever changing environment. Living London imparts differing scenes of London life, from the city's historic and contemporary sites to dizzying portrayals of every-day occurrences.
Drawing on a wealth of filmmaking experience, Fox uses his advanced technical skills to offer a fresh perspective on the notion of a city and its inhabitants. These new films, shot from point-of-view perspective with a wide-angle lens, combine both new and archival footage. Fox makes tangible films power to evoke the spatial and temporal sensations experienced in dreams, in particular kinæsthesia and the physiological perception of movement through space. In Living London, the city engulfs the Flâneur.

During his residency at 176 Fox has been working with a group of young people to make an additional work for the exhibtion. The young people, based at Castlehaven Youth Project and Camden Detached Youth Project, are working alongside Fox and his production team learning how to use a Super 16mm film camera and get the opportunity to direct, shoot and edit a film for inclusion in Living London.

Gerry Fox, born 1963, lives and works in London. Fox studied visual arts at Harvard University and is a BAFTA award winning documentary maker and has made some of the most celebrated films about contemporary artists of recent years, primarily for The South Bank Show.

The 176 programme is based on creative exhibition focused residencies for one artist and one curator a year. Gerry Fox's show is the first of the artist's residencies at 176, it will be followed by a curatorial project in May 2008 by Vincent Honoré, a Paris based independent curator.

Living London also includes works from the Zabludowicz Collection by artists including Alexander Heim, Chris Gilmour, Frank Auerbach, Gavin Turk, Gillian Wearing, Jules de Balincourt, Lei Xue, Mark Leckey, Mauricio Guillen,Michael Landy, Paul Johnson, Richard Hughes and Richard Wentworth.
A limited edition artist's book will be produced for the exhibition, publication contributors include; Marc Quinn, Will Self, Flora Fairbairn and Gerry Fox.

Gerry Fox was born in South Africa in 1963, and has lived and worked in London since 1980. Fox studied visual arts at Harvard University and has made some of the most celebrated films about contemporary artists of recent years, primarily for The South Bank Show. His two-part documentary about Gilbert and George won the BAFTA for Best Arts Film in 1998, the Royal Television Society Best Arts Film and The Grand Prize at The Festival of Films on Art in Montreal. In 2005 his feature-length portrait of Swiss American photographer Robert Frank won The Royal Television Society Best Arts Film, The Grand Prize in Montreal and The Grierson Award for Best Documentary in the Arts as well as triumphing at the Rotterdam Film Festival and the Viennale. Fox has also won The Chicago Film Festival Gold Hugo and Best Film at The Chicago Children's Film Festival for a film about child photographers living on Guatemala City's rubbish dump and a Prix Italia for a film about AIDS in South Africa. His other well-known films about the arts include profiles of Gerhard Richter, Claes Oldenburg, Marc Quinn, Christian Boltanski and Bill Viola. Fox has also created and produced several successful series on the arts for Channel 4, entitled Opening Shot, Cool Britannia and Sampled which profiled the work of contemporary artists including Tracey Emin, Alexander McQueen and Chris Ofili. He has been making his own art films for several years, and Living London marks his first solo presentation in an art context.

Living London Youth Interaction Project supported by Hakia.com, the meaning-based search engine, and the Post Factory, London.

Living London was accompanied by a series of artist-curated film screenings of works from the Zabludowicz and Lux Collections.