NEWS
EVENTS
Don’t Call Me Urban Exhibition
Other | Thursday 9th June 2011 | Osh
London is a city with many sides. It’s a city unlike any other in the world where different worlds exist parallel to and sometimes on top each other. The grimiest, toughest and greyest places can be found in the same postcode as some of the most privileged and exclusive streets in the world. This gives London a unique and alien urban landscape.
This disparity in wealth and power has lead to some very interesting cultural and musical scenes. In the grotty deprived council estates a new genre was born, it’s called Grime. What’s Grime? The simple but inaccurate answer to this question is ‘it’s a kind of urban music’.
This definition is shallow and misrepresented. Someone whose been trying to answer this question more comprehensibly is the photographer Simon Wheatley. Wheatley has meticulously captured over the last twelve years a London of disenfranchised youths. The London he’s captured is a very tribal one; it’s a place where music and gangs are one and the same.
Every one of his photos captures the emotions and lives of a generation of inner city council estate kids expressed through music. His pictures resonate with anger, aggression, strife and the hopes and dreams of the less glossy side of London. There’s a certain irony in background of many of the pictures. The carefully planned ‘future minded’ council estates seem to actually be cold, concrete prisons where the youths in the pictures are trapped. In some pictures loneliness seem to permeate out of the frame into the viewers eyes.
These pictures capture the rise of the movement and reflect the truth. The truth that grime culture wasn’t just something cool and flashy but real, gritty and dangerous. Wheatley’s exhibition captures the rise and fall of the ‘postcode’ wars.
The exhibitions main aim is the same as the grime artists that it documents. To show through music and culture that being urban is not ‘cool’ it’s tough, dangerous and hard. You can go see this amazing exhibition at Rich Mix between the 3rd of June to the 24th of June.
- Shaf Choudhury
