Our first touring exhibition grew out of a monthlong residency at St Pancras Crypt, adjacent to the HQ of The Artists Rifles, a volunteer regiment of actors, architects, musicians painters and sculptors formed in 1859, morphing into 21 SAS during The Cold War era. Returning from two years in New York City, after debuting his first solo show Name, Rank & Serial Number, Garry Hunter was looking to form an arts collective, which became Fitzrovia Noir…

A thread of site-specificity runs through the venues: the crypt was once an air-raid shelter, the museum a Cold War fallout shelter and the university’s de Havilland campus, a fighter-bomber factory. Artworks made over a sixty year period were rotated between shows, responding to each venue’s history. Giuseppe Di Bella’s Abu Ghraib series was the centrepiece at Peterborough, displayed in specially-made museum cabinets, a set of tourist postcards mailed with shocking images of torture at the infamous prison on the stamps, and retrieved from the addressees, one of whom had theirs personally delivered by suspicious US security staff in New York City. David Snoo Wilson’s Soil Archive features earth collected from atrocity sites, seeded with grass from those locations, with only the  Auschwitz sample never growing back. Architect and Lancaster navigator Kazimierz Zakrzewski-Rucinéski’s drawings of fellow prisoners at Stalag Luft III saw their first public exhibition at the university and were then given to the museum now at the site.

Project Title
Responses to Conflict and Loss

Locations
St Pancras Crypt, Dukes Road, London WC1
Space4 Gallery, Peterborough Museum, Priestgate 
UH Galleries, College Lane, Hatfield, Hertfordshire

Programme and Operations
Lucieta Williams for Fitzrovia Noir
Matthew Shaul for UH Galleries
Clifton Stewart for Space4 Gallery
Mark Pettit for UH Galleries
Amisha Karia for UH Galleries

UH exhibition book design
Ewan Buck

Foreword
Anthony Luvera

Published by University of Hertfordshire Press
and printed by Janet 45 Plovdiv

Archiving of work by Kazimierz Zakrzewski-Rucinéski
Helena Zakrzewska-Rucinéska

Curation
Garry Hunter for Fitzrovia Noir

Artists with locations where work produced or focussed

Media
Assemblage, cardboard, collage, ephemera, inherited objects, paint, photography, postcards, sculpture, soil, stamps, suicide note, textiles, video, 78 rpm 10” record

Dates
March 2008 – April 2009

Linda Anderson, attendee of Space4 Gallery preview