Mapping the Distance Between Us
Art redefines intimacy through performance, mediation, and shared civic space.
In London right now, intimacy is being recalculated in public view. At the Southbank Centre, Rambert and LA(HORDE) take over the site with We Should Have Never Walked On The Moon, a distributed performance that reorganises bodies, rooms, and routes. At Somerset House, Virtual Beauty studies how digital culture rewrites the face, the mirror, and the desire to be seen. And at Piccadilly Circus, Imperial War Museums present Es Devlin and Machiko Weston’s I Saw The World End for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki anniversaries, a public screen turned memorial. The human here is proximate, absent, doubled.
Southbank’s language is precise, roam at your own pace, discover artists in unexpected locations. The work stages proximity without possession — you stand on the Royal Festival Hall stage and watch from the stage, you traverse terraces and backstage corridors, intimacy is the re-plotting of distance rather than its erasure. It is choreography as civic map, a soft claim on public space that feels both playful and tender.
At Somerset House, Virtual Beauty is framed as a thought-provoking exhibition on how digital technologies impact definitions of beauty today. The curatorial voice invites viewers to consider filtered faces, AI distortions, and cosmetic imaginaries, but the wager is affective, not clinical. Screens, textiles, videos, bodies — the show makes a room for the ache between how we present and how we are. It treats simulated visage as a relational problem, not a purely technical one.
IWM’s presentation of I Saw The World End returns a different kind of intimacy to the city, a collective nocturne. On the giant Piccadilly Lights, Devlin and Weston’s film responds to specific minutes in August 1945, a British and Japanese perspective held in a single luminous plane. The museum stresses archive and collaboration, memory voiced through contemporary form. People stop, look up, listen. Presence happens, though no one touches.
These three London moments redraw the map between bodies, images, and sites. They do not console, they compose conditions where feeling can occur — sometimes quietly, sometimes in public glare. For SUPERWRX, this is intimacy as sovereignty, not possession, aligned with our values of liminality, ethical refusal, and memory held in shared air.
