LONDON.- Hercules: Rough Cut, David Blandy’s new commission for Bloomberg SPACE, explores empire, civilisation, London and language in a hypnotically rotating, mutating installation of video and voice. It is the latest work for Bloomberg SPACE in the 2015 series ‘The Homecoming’, a programme of four projects by Adam Dant, Gayle Chong Kwan, David Blandy and Melanie Manchot that explore and respond to the history and architecture of the City of London

Hercules: Rough Cut, refers to the Roman version of the Greek Heracles, which gave rise to a series of stories rife with internal contradictions and gathered from multiple sources that has inspired artists and writers through time. Drawing on Bloomberg’s vast archive of global financial news footage, Blandy layers and amalgamates images of the agricultural, the economic, the cultural, the political and the industrial on four screens that revolve and turn next to a large-scale projection. His pulsing poetic rap narrates an alternative history of the City of London (and the world) informed by mythology, war, disease, injustice, technology and development. He references the language, style and cadence of Roman declamations, Thomas More, Samuel Johnson, William Blake, 1950s Beat poets and contemporary street talk.

David Blandy’s practice spans performance, video and installation to investigate popular culture and its relationship to the human experience. His work has featured in solo exhibitions and group shows including recently at BALTIC 39, Newcastle; INIVA, London; Centre d'art et photographie de Lectoure, France; ICI, Berlin; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai.

David Blandy is represented by Seventeen Gallery www.seventeengallery.com and his films are distributed through LUX