Ben Grace was commissioned to capture the gallery imagery for Time After Time, an exhibition curated by Stephen Foster, Director of John Hansard Gallery from 1987 to 2017, reflecting on the Gallery’s history, programme and changing relationship with its locations.
Founded in 1980, John Hansard Gallery spent almost four decades on the University of Southampton’s Highfield campus before relocating to a purpose-built city-centre space in Guildhall Square in 2018. Throughout its history, the Gallery developed a distinctive programme with a particular interest in conceptual art and its influence on successive generations of artists, while its position within the University enabled artists to collaborate with academics across a wide range of disciplines.
Time After Time brought together a selection of significant site-specific installations originally presented at the Gallery between 1992 and 2016. Works by Caroline Bergvall, Victor Burgin, Hamad Butt, John Latham and Charlotte Posenenske were revisited alongside a new work by Walter van Rijn, creating a dialogue between the Gallery’s past and present spaces.
By reimagining temporary installations in a new context, the exhibition explored how the meaning and impact of site-specific work can shift over time and how the location in which a work is encountered becomes part of its history.
Ben’s photography documented the exhibition and its individual works, capturing the relationship between the re-presented installations, the Gallery architecture and the spaces in which these historic works were brought back to life.
Through community filmmaking charity City Eye, we were commissioned to photograph this exhibition.
Find out more about City Eye here