Lockdown Love Stories on the High Street x Derwent London
Multi-site exhibition public art exhibition across London
13 Retail Sites across London vinyled with Lockdown Love Stories
12th - 30th August 2021 ♥ curated by Philippa Found ♥ Sponsored by Derwent London
True stories self-love, friendship, getting over exes, falling in love and positive break-ups during lockdown, submitted anonymously by the public to the art-storytelling project, Lockdown Love Stories, will be displayed across 13 of Derwent London’s buildings – transforming vacant retail spaces across London into a multi-site public art exhibition and shifting a casualty of the pandemic – the high street – into a site of hope and resilience.
Enlivening windows from Oxford Street to Shoreditch High Street in Lockdown Love Stories signature pink and a bold red font, these are normal people’s true stories platformed in non-art spaces to highlight and normalise the reality of love and dating today.
This is feminist art intervention and activist storytelling, updated for the Instagram and Covid generation.
What’s your lockdown love story?
(Photos by Karishma Puri)
Locations:
3. 22 Tottenham Court Road, W1
5. 101 Tottenham Court Road, W1
7. Blue Star House 234-244 Stockwell Rd, London SW9 9SP
8. Greencoat House, 1 Greencoat Row, Francis St, London SW1P 1DH
9. 5-8 Hardwick Street, EC1R 4RG
10. Tea Building, 56 Shoreditch High Street, E1 6JJ
11. White Collar Factory, 1 Old Street Yard, EC1Y 8AF
12. White Chapel Building, 10 Whitechapel High Street, E1 8QS
Lockdown Love Stories interventions in public space
Re-configuring public space as an exhibition space has always been at the heart of the Lockdown Love Stories project and a deliberate strategy embedded into the projects ethos of diversity of representation.
At a time when traditional exhibition spaces were closed due to lockdown, injecting stories as art directly into public space through both guerrilla style interventions and sponsored collaborations with companies outside of the art and literature world was a deliberate feminist strategy by the artist behind Lockdown Love Stories, Philippa Found, aiming to capture the stories and voices of those not necessarily traditionally represented in art and literature.
The public spaces that Philippa brought Lockdown Love Stories to were deliberately chosen for being spaces that are accessed by a wide demographic of people regardless of age, gender, sexuality, race or class and also for having a specific connection to the narrative of lockdown:
In Lockdown 1, Philippa gathered submissions through guerilla chalking of the lockdown love stories website URL in parks: the one place out of our home we were allowed to enjoy, which became the site of lockdown dating.
In Lockdown 2, Lockdown Love Stories collaborated with TFL staff to bring a selection of Lockdown Love Stories to the London Underground. Normally the heart of London, the public transport network became a site of anxiety in the pandemic, and was also a space only accessible to key workers for a time.
Now as Lockdown 3 lifts, this collaboration with Derwent London transforms another casualty of the pandemic – the high street – into a site of hope and positivity, reactivating vacant retrial spaces with stories of love and empowerment to have emerged during lockdown.
Metro, 11.08.21
The Independent, 12.08.21
Mail Online, 29.08.21
The C-Word, 28.08.21
Journal hr, 03.01.22