Past Event
Friday 1 September | 5-7.30pm | Free, booking required
Book launch, Koenig Bookshop (Whitechapel Gallery foyer) at 5pm
Walk departs at 5.45pm
Join a launch and a walk celebrating a new book printed by Plaintiff Press, drawing on the research connected to Parallel Urbanisms, a walk first commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery for Nocturnal Creatures 2018.
Experience a time-traveling circuit of the social, architectural and media scapes of this textured and turbulent area of East London. Led by artist Jaspar Joseph-Lester and writer Simon King, this walk explores elements of Los Angeles in the East End. Contributions from artists Osman Yousefzada and William Cobbing draw connections to their work in the current exhibition, Life Is More Important Than Art.
The tour takes both a historical perspective (focusing on Jack London’s The People of the Abyss published in 1903) and a more contemporary analysis, looking to images of the future as a way to consider how LA exists deep within Whitechapel and London in general.
Jaspar Joseph-Lester is a London-based artist, whose work explores the role images play in urban planning, social space and everyday praxis. Here he has focused on the conflicting ideological frameworks embodied in representations of modernity, urban renewal and regeneration as a means to better understand how art practice can redefine the successive cycle of masterplans and regeneration schemes that determine the cultural life of our cities. Joseph-Lester is Professor of Critical Spatial Practice at the Royal College of Art.
Simon King is a writer and researcher who works collaboratively to create socially-engaged, ‘non-heritage’ walking tours that have an overarching theme or narrative and a distinctive mapping methodology i.e., bringing in to play metaphorical and literal correspondences and archival ephemera that includes old maps, postcards, family photographs and literary sources.
