Arcade and Flat Time Home are happy to current a brand new exhibition with Can Altay. For over 20 years, Altay has been addressing how we reside collectively and the way we inhabit the constructed surroundings and the planet via his investigations into the politics of on a regular basis life, public house, city ecologies, and inventive motion. Altay typically produces “settings” that open themselves to frequent use and act as websites of collective manufacturing. A recurring space of exploration is the inhabitation of infrastructural areas. Not too long ago, he has been engaged on devices and speculations round entry to water, tapping into seen and not-so-visible flows within the metropolis. This exhibition brings collectively these latest explorations on water, movement, and circulation, taking its organisational cues from how John Latham structured and outlined the varied interconnecting areas of Flat Time Home. 

In the primary gallery, The Thoughts, the 4-channel video ensemble Mississippi Steppes (2024), opens the exhibition and marks a preoccupation with “flows” and transitioning states. The movies embody numerous photographs of waves, flows, and infrastructure on a river, hinting at a sort of abundance as nicely a way of management and extraction. That is additionally implied by reference to a contrasting eco-region, the “steppe,” throughout the set up’s title. 

Following on, the hall main from The Mind to The Hand hosts a sculpture—tunnel imaginative and prescient pipe dream (2024)—made for viewing via. Akin to a contained river or a sewage pipe, the system suggests a extra linear motion and movement of water. Guests are welcome to deal with, look via, and return this system to its wall mount.

This sculpture can be employed within the filming of Teenage Sherbourne (2024), a video created from discovered YouTube footage shot via the tubular viewing system. Within the video we comply with the eyes of an city explorer strolling via the river Sherbourne that flows below the town of Coventry. This hidden water system, frequent in lots of cities the place rivers had been culverted and hidden from view, typically merging with sewerage and different infrastructure, reveals a scenic underbelly the place the center of a metropolis merges with pure water flows. The video additionally contains components from the title sequence of Nineteen Nineties cartoon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which additionally takes place in an identical setting: underground sewers the place the protagonists dwell and have emerged from.

The Physique Occasion of Flat Time Home, the place this video is positioned—generally known as “Plumbing” by Latham, and as “the center” by Altay—additionally holds a working desk. Dimly lit by a desk lamp, the floor is roofed by books of geography and local weather fiction that Altay was studying whereas working via a few of the core questions of the exhibition. Slightly than giving an authoritative bibliography, these provide a extra exploratory method to sources encountered within the course of.

Sharing the floor is Stretching Heron (2024), a video work on a small display screen nesting on the desk. The snippet reveals a heron on a tiny islet on the Mississippi which capabilities as a rookery for the station of herons alongside their migratory route. Animals sharing house with people in an city setting has been a recurring theme in Altay’s work for a few years. The collective nouns for animals—for example these for heron embody “a siege of herons,” “a glean of herons,” or “a station of herons”—recommend the anthropomorphised relationships that happen inside this context. This anthropomorphism can be echoed in the folks that inhabit Altay’s drawings, typically depicted withbeaks or beakish faces; and within the fictional anomaly of teenage turtles attributable to toxicity in sewage.

Inside the ultimate gallery, The Hand we encounter the 1/1 scale prototype of a rainwater harvesting fountain, Been Ready for the Rain to Fall (Sebil I) (2023). This work takes its cues from the historic “sebil” ingesting fountains in Türkiye that double as public sculptural items in addition to appearing as nodes or websites for gathering; and in addition from the latest developments in regenerative applied sciences and the potential use of rainwater harvesting in public areas. The fountain’s modular assemblage additionally means that what follows this prototype can evolve into emergency aid for entry to water in a disaster context and in addition into a everlasting fixture inside a metropolis. 

From buried rivers and underground waterways in cities to harvesting rainwater, Altay displays on the query of water by way of entry and high quality. Inexpensive energy and unpolluted waterways are common public considerations whereas developments in producing and deploying renewable power sources, reutilising or harnessing climatic components akin to wind and rain, progress slowly. Latest drawings by Altay, which he scrapes over newsprint, think about and incessantly re-depict the fountain as a important expertise, accumulating and re-distributing water. These each push the sculptural proposition into a extra speculative realm via scenes and designs, however additionally anchor it to our present actuality via the political perils seen in the every day newspaper.

at Flat Time House, London
till July 7, 2024