CTY / Unknown Places

CYT / Unknown Places is a two-person exhibition featuring two British artists: Polly Tootal and Antony Cairns, represented by Intervalle. Both share a fascination with megacities and their hidden corners. Polly Tootal tracks down spatio-temporal fissures in hybrid urban spaces: after meticulous scouting, she uses a view camera to capture silent in-betweens—places entirely shaped by humans but devoid of human presence. Her images whisper of universal anonymity and expose the illusion of a tranquil city, free of friction or drama. Antony Cairns, for his part, decontextualizes the city: his nighttime views, bathed in artificial light, bring forth ghostly buildings floating in a sooty haze. He processes and retouches his prints in the darkroom, then digitizes them and prints them on now-obsolete digital media, to better reveal the unease of reality.