City of Disappearances at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco

Taking the title from Iain Sinclair's 'anthlogy of absence', London: City of Disappearances (2006), the exhibition imagines a transposition and exchange of the living-imaginary of London conjured in the book with the fictions and myths of San Francisco. Exploring the language of the city through paintings, videos, photography and sculpture it will travel on to the Zabludowicz Collection, London in February next year

Co-curator Joseph del Pesco says: “Variously recognizable in the exhibition are corporeal vanishings, filmic echoes from the past dissolving in the present, and contaminated memories. The exhibition argues for the insubstantiality of the city as a concrete material and conceptual container, proposing instead that numerous cities live but are eventually forgotten in the minds of its inhabitants. Does the city make the people, or do the people make the city? Whether we observe the formation of cities by their inhabitants or the formation of inhabitants by the cities in which they live, we recognize the city as a primary dilemma, a tension that is prevalent in all the works on view."

The exhibition will travel to Zabludowicz Collection as Infinite City, a title taken from Rebecca Solnit's book of the same name, which illuminated the diversity of San Francisco, its history and its inhabitants through a series of colour maps created in collaboration with artists, writers and cartographers. For more information on the exhibition at Zabludowicz Collection in February next year click here

Featured artists
Michel Auder, Slater Bradley, Martin Boyce, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, John Menick, Enrique Metinides, Yelena Popova, Amie Siegel, Kelley Walker

City of Disappearances
September 10 - December 14, 2013
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts | 360 Kansas Street | San Francisco | CA 94103 | USA
For more information on City of Disappearances go to the Wattis website

Infinite City
26 February - 11 May 2014
Zabludowicz Collection | 176 Prince of Wales Road | London | NW5 3PT | UK