The Appearance of a Distance Current exhibition

Taking its name from the German thinker Walter Benjamin’s description of the aura, this exhibition looks at the contemporary manifestation of distance: the distance between things, ideas and ourselves. In an era of connectivity, why does everything seem so far apart?

Drawing from libraries, archives and flea-markets in both Barcelona and London, Louis Porter has inverted, magnified, transposed and modified scientific and educational material in order to highlight the paradox of distance at the heart of modernity. Combining a variety of photographic techniques with found materials, the exhibition is divided into four sections, each addressing a point further away from the viewer. Palmistry manuals, documentation of solar eclipses, Victorian trigonometry exercises, encyclopaedic illustrations and popular scientific journals are simultaneously blended and fragmented.