Bloc Billboard: Ben Yau
28 August – 08 November
Free & Open to All
We are delighted to present a new Bloc Billboard Commission by artist Ben Yau, who is the second artist to present work as part of the 2020 billboard programme and his new work Extractive Model Study has been installed on our billboard located alongside the gallery on Eyre Lane.
Yau’s artworks employ the aesthetics of global conflict, historical narratives, and social tensions. Trained in lens-based media and interested in the historical as a means to understand present crises, he now works with materials found from a research-intensive process that are then collaged or montaged in the mediums of works on paper and moving image. His multi-media projects engage a diverse range of materials, such as declassified CIA documents, British Ministry of Defence research papers, newspaper clippings, and videos found on the internet. By way of appropriation, Yau addresses the processes or moments of political rupture.
Extractive Model Study arranges images from the Ministry of Defence archive with diagrams and illustrations depicting machinery used in the extraction of gold, silver, and diamond. These images and illustrations are imagined together as a visual blueprint for extractive capitalism that is historically rooted and often brutally enforced. In their original use cases, these constituent elements fit into a process of concealing and supporting imperial dominance. The arrangement of diagrams illustrate a structure of territorial conquest and the dispossession of indigenous people’s lands, while the corresponding photographs disguise violence, redirecting attention towards a sense of awe and sublime. When arranged together, these images and illustrations trace the contours of new forms of British imperialism.
The work contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Ben Yau (b.1992, Glasgow) is a Chinese-Scots visual artist based in London. Yau graduated from Camberwell College of Arts in the study of Fine Art Photography in 2019 and in the same year was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries as well as Creekside Open. Selected exhibitions include his solo presentation Proximate Currents: When Everything Fuses Together, Iniva (online/London 2020); and group exhibitions Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2019, Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds, and South London Gallery, London (2019); We Breathe in the Space Between, MIR Project Space (London 2019); On Power, Central Saint Martins (London 2019); and Creekside Open 2019 Selected by Sacha Craddock, APT Gallery (London 2019).
Yau lives and works in London.