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A while ago, I was invited by Grace Johnston and Calum Sutherland, who form the curatorial initiative Cento, to have a solo exhibition a 20 Albert Road, an art space in Glasgow that they co-run along with A-M-G5 and Ivory Tars. After coming up with and getting rid of several so-so ideas for the exhibition, out of the blue, while taking a stroll in my neighbourhood, I thought of searching for the address 20 Albert Road on Google Maps. It made me say wow on the street, surprised by what was, for me, an unexpected abundance of results. Calum and Grace later informed me that it is due to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the husband of Queen Victoria, but at that time I had no idea. Anyway, I was intrigued to find out how many locations all around the world share the same address. I first asked Chat GPT to list all of them, but it apologised to me for being unable to find such a list readily available and, instead, it suggested to me that I look at a ‘database that contains worldwide address information’. The next moment I found myself back on Google Maps, manually searching for the address in different regions of the world, beginning with London. In the end, I found 136 locations: 107 in the United Kingdom and 29 in the rest of the world. Almost every place is associated with British colonial history––although, in Hong Kong, I could only find a 20 Lower Albert Road. Here, I am sharing the full list directly with you. Rather mysteriously, it says that it includes ‘156 places’. It is also recorded in the artist’s book we made for the exhibition. My project departed from this list. I connected the 107 locations in the UK on Photoshop in alphabetical order, using the second line of the addresses, with the last one connected back to the first. This created 888 intersections, together making up a complex jagged form. I did the same with the 29 locations in the rest of the world, which ended up making 68 intersections and generating a much simpler form. At the gallery, I spent a week hand-painting these shapes on two MDF boards, both taken directly from the space: the vertical one had been used as the cover for an electricity meter, and the other, horizontal one as a cover for the storage space above the entrance to the toilet. The paints employed were from the space as well; I used the natural white emulsion paint they normally use for their walls and fabricated a dark-pinkish paint by scraping plaster dust from the back wall and mixing it with gum arabic, following Calum’s preliminary experiments. As an extra piece, I also enjoyed working on a sheet of recycled A4 paper normally used for their press releases, painting a third form generated from Scotland’s 7 locations. Here, you can see the entire installation. As you see in the above-mentioned link, there was also a shelf with a few postcards. We had sent the exhibition invitation to all the locations––107 British and 29 international ones––stamped with the late Queen Elizabeth II’s head and that of the new King’s respectively, to invite the occupant(s) of each place to the exhibition, dreaming that they would actually show up. On the shelf, which was taken from the gallery’s toilet, we initially installed the postcard that had been sent to the gallery itself, and have added others as they were returned, for which the most frequent reason has been: ‘address not found’. Unfortunately, the one we sent to ourselves went missing during the crazy opening on the 21st of January 2024, but here are the others that have come back to us thus far:
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