Other People’s Projects: Inventory

Under a Walter Benjamin motto, “the inventory of the street is inexhaustible,” Inventory proclaim a sociological trawl through the city. In acts of re-appropriation, found objects are modified, altered, written upon and carved into and the street becomes the site for defiant interventions. Acts of subjective and collective resistance to established order rally against alienated existence, consumer culture, and the regimentation of urban space. Inventory’s journal Inventory exists primarily as an agitational force, concerned with ideas, content, and communication first and foremost, creating an enthused writing that penetrates the marginal and the everyday, the theoretical and the sensorial, for a readership that refuses to be crushed by this meager existence. Inventory’s installation at White Columns – their first in the United States – will bring together material from a number of earlier projects including: placards from a street action held in Central London in 1999; posters from the resulting publication Smash This Puny Existence, 1999; the video Sleepwalkers, 2003, which was filmed at an “Americana” festival in central England; and a display of the complete run of their journal Inventory.

Inventory have exhibited widely in the U.K., Europe and Japan, including individual exhibitions at The Approach, London (2004, and 1999/2000); and The Modern Institute, Glasgow (1999); and in group exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris (1996); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2000); Büro Friedrich, Berlin (2000); Tate Modern, London (2001); and Portikus, Frankfurt (2004), amongst many others. In 2003 they were nominated for the Beck’s Futures Award at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Inventory’s Smash This Puny Existence, a series of six fly-posters – commissioned by Matthew Higgs – was published by Book Works, London, in 1999. Inventory are represented by The Approach, London. The journal Inventory is available from Cornerhouse Distribution www.cornerhouse.org.