David Blandy has established his terrain through a series of investigations into the cultural forces that influence him, ranging from his love of hip hop and soul, to computer games and manga. His works slip between performance and video, reality and construct, using references sampled from the disparate sources that provide his sense of self. His film, Child of the Atom, draws on his family history and is perhaps the most intimate and direct piece of self examination, following directly from earlier works which sought to question how much of a Western sense of identity can be constructed from diverse popular sources.
Recent projects include solo shows at John Hansard Gallery, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany; Bloomberg Space, London; Crossroads, a solo exhibition at Spike Island, Bristol that toured to Turner Contemporary, Margate, and 176 Project Space, London and a solo show at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead.
Biography
Seventeen Exhibitions
Alternate Presence
The Grid
The End of the World
Background
Child of the Atom
Press
Art Review, Whats left for art in the biocybernetic era? Jamie Sutcliffe, 2023
Art Monthly review of The World After at Focal Point Gallery, 2020
art agenda review of The World After at Focal Point Gallery, 2020
The Guardian, Anatomy of an artwork, Skye Sherwin, 2020
ThisIsTomorrow review 2020
Frieze review by Tom Morton, 2019
art agenda on David Blandy’s The End of the World, at Seventeen Gallery, 2017
Vice: Creators, “GTA V Sets the Stage for an Exploration of Racism, Identity, and 21st Century Youth”, on Larry Achiampong & David Blandy’s FF Gaiden: Alternative, 2016
ThisIsTomorrow on David Blandy’s Hercules: Rough Cut, 2015
Hyperallergic, Artist as Monk, Manga, and Pilgrim, 2013
FAD Magazine, Interview with David Blandy, 2012
The Guardian, Artist of the Week: David Blandy, 2010
Exhibition view of Atomic Light – David Blandy at John Hansard Gallery, 2023. Images: Reece Straw
David Blandy, The World After, 2019
Installation view at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea.
David Blandy, The End of the World, 2017
Single channel video with sound, 13 minutes
Installation view at Seventeen, London
David Blandy, HD Lifestyle, 2017
HD video on 11 screens, display cases, laptops, monitors, mobile phones, smart phones, LED sign, silver vinyl, grey carpet, mirror, wireless headphones, acrylic stands
6 minutes 40 seconds
90 x 382 x 61 cm
HD Lifestyle focuses on the physical nature of the screen, its component elements and the cost of their extraction. Blandy notes the physicality of the Cloud, the ocean floor cables and rare earth minerals that are extracted at such an environmental cost that the Chinese state has designated specific ‘sacrificial zones’ – concentrated toxic wastelands permitted in order to maintain high levels of production. The material forms of ‘the device’ are countered by the users desire for dematerialisation, to be brought closer to the information, the game, the experience, to reach through the screen and interact directly with content. The video plays across multiple screens, on monitors, laptops and smart phones, displayed in a battered shop counter display.
David Blandy, How to fly, 2020
Single channel video with sound
6 mins 23 seconds
Commissioned by John Hansard Gallery
The Guardian: Skye Sherwin review of How to Fly, John Hansard Online, 2020
Tank Magazine review of How to Fly, John Hansard Online, 2020
The Double Negative: Mike Pinnington review of How to Fly, John Hansard Online, 2020
The Archive, 2017
Video on virtual reality headset, cardboard boxes, single channel video on monitor
5 minute 19 seconds
205 x 250 x 111 cm
The Archive (2017) is a video made inside the Hans Tasiemka Archive, using 360-degree filming technology. This sprawling resource is run by 94-year-old Edda Tasiemka from a 1920s semi-detached house in Golders Green, London. Amassed over decades, the collection holds hundreds of thousands of idiosyncratically catalogued newspaper cuttings forming a web of interconnected stories and information. Masses of cuttings are kept all around the house, from the toilet to her garage, categorised through subjects as diverse as ‘The Family’, ‘Isis’ and the ‘Kardashians’. Using a VR headset the viewer is deposited into the centre of the sprawling, obsolete accumulation, able to examine the mess, which is overlaid by a rhythmic narration about memory and our ability to record knowledge.
Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, Finding Fanon Part Three: Prologue, 2016
Ultra HD colour video, stereo sound
14 minutes
Installation view at Tate Modern, London
Finding Fanon Part Three: Prologue is a story based on the collaboration of Sartre and Fanon and their recognition of the problems and pain caused by the economically and politically powerful on the less privileged, particularly, of the colonised. It is a meditative, naturalist cinematic portrayal on the fragility of friendships and brings the story of Fanon and Sartre’s collaboration to life; it is a minimalist story of friendship, loss and alienation in the current era.
The two characters in tweed suits, are on a journey on foot with their children. As the hours progress and the landscape evolves, the two families move through a range of subtle emotions, enacting a pilgrimage of mutual confusion, sudden insight and recurring intimations of a larger battle. When they arrive at their final destination, a shelter made deep in the woods, they must either confront the divergent paths they have taken or somehow transcend their growing tensions in an act of forgiveness and forging a new way towards a more equal future.
Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, FF Gaiden ESCAPE, 2017
Installation view at ‘Untitled: Art On The Conditions Of Our Time’, New Art Exchange, Nottingham
David Blandy, Hercules Rough Cut, 2015
Installation view at Bloomberg Space, July 2015
Hercules invented hip hop. Named on the basketball courts of crumbling civilisation, street lights powered block parties, merry go rounds broke the beat back to back, hop from track to track, each transition a labour, fruit from the quest for the funkadelic and the apache, the bongo beating out the beat, unique configurations induced visions from the oracle, it began.
Hercules: Rough Cut, David Blandy’s commission for Bloomberg SPACE, explores empire, civilisation, London and language in a hypnotically rotating, mutating installation of video and voice.
David Blandy, Installation view of Anjin 1600: Edo Wonderpark, 2013
www.createlondon.org/event/anjin-1600-edo-wonderpark-david
David Blandy, Crossroads, 2009
Single channel video and installation
13 minutes 26 seconds
Crossroads sees Blandy undertake a mission through rural Mississippi – on a quest for guitar skills to match those of legendary bluesman Robert Johnson. A cotton plantation worker who died aged 27, Johnson left behind 29 songs, three grave stones, two photographs and an engaging myth. While his biography is hazy and contested, his legacy as a major figure in the formation of delta blues music is indisputable. Blandy’s installation features a revealing filmic portrait of the area, in which the landscape becomes a player in the search for the crossroads where Johnson exchanged his soul for a tuned guitar and an unmatched gift to play it. Taking in Johnson’s three graves and many more crossroads, the work continues Blandy’s exploration of race, culture and self.
David Blandy, Crossroads, 2009
Single channel video and installation
13 minutes 26 seconds
Installation view at 176 Projects / Zabludowicz Collection, 2009
David Blandy, Child of the Atom, 2010
Single channel video
14 minutes 06 seconds
Family lore regarding David Blandy’s grandfather, held as a POW in Malaya and Taiwan from 1942, provides the genesis of Blandy’s film, Child of the Atom. Generated by an underlying guilt about his own and also his daughter’s existence, Blandy’s film documents their visit to Hiroshima to literally and symbolically search for their ‘origins’.
David Blandy, Child of the Atom, 2010
Single channel video on hard drive as media file
114 minutes 06 seconds
David Blandy, Child of the Atom, 2010
Mixed media installation
David Blandy, Dual and Dualities, 2011
Reprogrammed and customised arcade machine
201 x 114 x 210 cm
David Blandy, Dual and Dualities, 2011 (screenshot)
Reprogrammed and customised arcade machine
201 x 114 x 210 cm
David Blandy, Dual and Dualities – Battle of the Soul, 2011
Reprogrammed and customised arcade machine, banners
201 x 114 x 410 cm
