Cooke Latham Gallery is delighted to announce Glitch: The City as Palimpsest, a group exhibition curated by Huma Kabakci including works by Radhika Khimji, Hamish Pearch, Shahpour Pouyan, Jaro Varga and Adia Wahid. A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been modified or changed but that still retains traces of earlier text. In this exhibition Kabakci uses the palimpsest as a metaphor for the city; a site of multiple writings, re-writings and erasures. Working in a variety of different media the five artists negate the concept of any city as having a fixed identity and instead reveal the urban environment as existing in a constant state of flux; subject to the changing environmental, social and economic forces that define it./// 

Shahpour Pouyan has created two domed ‘reliquaries’ as part of an ongoing series referencing historic monuments. Embedded in both sculptures are replicas of human cranium acting as the cupola atop Pouyan’s architectural forms. The work plays upon the infinite variety inherent to architecture and human DNA and is perhaps a nod to the vanitas tradition. Alongside these sculptures are two Persian miniatures, part of a series in which Pouyan painstakingly recreates an original manuscript while removing all human form from the composition. The backdrop has become the subject - a meditation upon the absence of presence.