Artist Billboard presents commissions by diverse international artists on an outdoor billboard-like hoarding at The SPACE, St John’s Road, St Leonards on Sea, East Sussex.

The works can be viewed from pavement and street level from summer 2021 to summer 2022.

Artist Billboard’s fourth commission (October – November 2021) was:

Pavilion of Insurrection and Pleasure : Coming Soon by Photolanguage (Nigel Green & Robin Wilson)

Pavilion of Insurrection and Pleasure juxtaposes a history of utopian architecture with specific, local themes of architectural heritage and contemporary urban development contexts. It re-situates one of the 1930s coastal shelters of the Hastings and St Leonards sea front by Borough Engineer Sidney Little to the Tempo Arts Billboard site, re categorising it as a proposed ‘Pavilion of Insurrection and Pleasure’. The image involves a direct sampling of details from The SPACE’s surrounding built environment to simulate an architectural intervention, alluding to the billboard renderings of proposed redevelopment projects of the contemporary town scape: ‘Coming Soon’.This new category of pavilion references the utopian architectures of Nicholas Ledoux in the 18th century, invoking radical forces that are suppressed from the contemporary city, but now to be gathered here in this hinterland space, the ‘terrain-vague’ of the billboard site. The aim of the piece is to activate a site-specific, poetic and utopian space of visual play, whilst critiquing the often vacuous nature of the contemporary, developer’s digital render, and the weakness of institutions to propose alternative urban futures.

Photolanguage was established in 1998 as a collaborative art practice working across image and text. Often working in the context of regional histories of architecture and land use, the practice seeks to bring to the surface suppressed narratives of identity, to re-evaluate the outmoded, to construct new meaning from the overlooked. Exhibitions include Transmodernity: Calais Reconstruction (Galerie de l’Ancienne Poste, Calais), Dark Season Botany (The Museum of Garden History, London), La Revue Générale Brutaliste (Institut Français London), East Sussex Modern, (Electro Studios, St Leonards) and Re-wiring Brutalism (Barbican Centre). Publications include Calais Vu Par Nigel Green et Robin Wilson (Musée des Beaux Arts et de la Dentelle, Calais, 2001), Land Use Poetics, co-edited with Maria Hellström Reimer (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Landscape Architecture, 2011), and they are currently working on a new book on Parisian Brutalist architecture. Photolanguage’s work has appeared in The Architects’ Journal, Architectural Design, Church Building, Icon, On Site Review, P.E.A.R. Magazine and the RIBA Journal.

The Space, Tempo Arts’ meanwhile arts venue, is the former site of the local railway workers’ social club in St Leonards.

Visit our Projects section to view other Artist Billboard commissions.

Artist Billboard has been realised with the support of Hastings and St Leonards Foreshore Charitable Trust.