LONDON CALLING

2016

Solo Exhibition | John Birchall Studio | Columbia Rd | London

London Calling marked Shek’s second solo exhibition and brought together a series of silkscreen prints drawn from London’s urban landscape. The works articulate a deliberate tension between the digital and the physical, staging abrupt visual juxtapositions in which sharply saturated fields of colour collide with desaturated photographic imagery. These photographic fragments, stripped of specific narrative content, operate less as documentary records than as mnemonic surfaces, simultaneously emptied of meaning and charged with collective nostalgia.

The images recall a familiar London that is recognisable to both tourists and local communities, yet curiously distant, hovering between presence and absence. Within this visual dissonance, an underlying concern with community begins to surface, not as an explicit subject but as a latent thread running through the work. The exhibition, presented at John Birchall’s Studio on Columbia Road, London, signals an early articulation of themes that would later become central to Shek’s practice.

Both the Rio Cinema on Dalston Kingsland Road and the Screen on the Green in Angel serve communities often overlooked by mainstream commercial cinema. When considering cinema as a social space, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle inevitably comes to mind. Debord, a Marxist theorist and founding member of the Situationist International, critiqued how lived experience is increasingly replaced by representation, a framework that continues to inform the artist’s practice.

While these cinemas have been forced to partially accommodate mainstream programming, they remain committed to their original ethos. This tension between independence and commercial pressure becomes a point of departure for imagining alternative spaces of interaction. These compositions mark an early moment in the artist’s practice, where utopian landscapes begin to merge with black-and-white photography, forming the foundations of a more coherent visual language.

Trellick Tower, a Brutalist residential building on Golborne Road, a short distance from Portobello Road Market, has become an enduring icon of modern London. Frequently framed by media narratives that emphasise social problems, the tower has also been a site of cultural resistance and creative production.

In the early 1980s, a creative duo, Leroy Anderson and Ranking Miss P, established a pirate radio station operating from Trellick Tower. Originally known as Rebel Radio, the station later became DBC (Dread Broadcasting Corporation), a deliberate play on the BBC. Broadcasting at 93.9 FM, the station provided an alternative voice for communities excluded from mainstream media, challenging dominant narratives and asserting cultural presence.

The station was eventually shut down and replaced by a BBC mast. This work serves as an homage to those creative voices that operated outside official structures, using informal media to question authority and give space to alternative forms of expression.