Pencil
Photography Andy Sewell
Birthday Exhibition
Southbank Centre
27 January 2012, 10:00am - 29 January 2012, 23:00pm Royal Festival Hall - Cloakroom Lobby - Level 1
Try bringing to mind four friends, simultaneously, within the space of a second.
If you managed that then you’re getting close to imagining how many people are being born onto the planet right now.
So why is it when we hear such information we are usually awed by the scale at which it’s happening yet somehow that very information soon becomes another piece of trivia?
It’s a question artist Sam Winston has been working on for a few years and in collaboration with The Southbank Centre he’s proposing an experiment.
“What if we took certain statistics - like the ones close to our hearts , say our birth and death rates - and literally tried recording each birth or death with a drawn circle - how long would it take to portray 12 hours of life on our planet?
For the work I am inviting people to the Royal Festival Hall to register a birth or death by drawing a circle to celebrate one of the 1/4 of a million lives that come and go every day. This in turn sits beside a wall of names registering these birth and deaths.
The effect is a transformation of a seemingly incomprehensible statistic into a very real sea of 260,082 brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers. And this is an invitation for people to partake in that.”
The installation forms part of The Southbank Centre’s ‘Death - A Festival For The Living’ in which The Southbank Centre takes a look at how culture can provide an essential role in helping us under- stand and come to terms with this unkonwable certainty.
