CutUp

CutUp are an anonymous artists collective, comprised of individuals from across Europe who, living and working in London, produce artwork as one entity.

 

Linked by a shared desire to reorder the urban landscape through intervention, CutUp incorporates film, video, collage and installation into a practise that locates itself predominantly in the urban outdoors. CutUp’s belief in utilising existing materials from the street, has led to works manifesting themselves as the re-ordering of a posters and street furniture, recycling existing materials, particularly focussing on interrupting and re-appropriating established visual forms such as billboards and other forms of advertising.

 

This practise has been temporarily brought into a gallery context in the two exhibitions held at SEVENTEEN. Both exhibitions featured works both in the gallery space itself and also across London as a whole. CutUp’s billboard and bus stop works are created by slicing up an advert and reassembling the pieces into a newly ordered image, and the subject matter is derived from images found in the mainstream media. This has included images of children subjected to Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs), modernist tower-blocks and protest riots.

 

While words such as ‘graffiti’, ‘subverting’ and ‘reclaiming’ are easy to use with regard to CutUp’s cultural position, they are perhaps of limited use in what is an extremely diverse and open-ended way of working.



CutUp, Untitled, 2007, Drilled board in lightbox