A City Without Seams: Leeds Corn Exchange exhibition explores 33 wards of Leeds

National World - LocalTV

Artist Keith Khan has launched ‘A City Without Seams’ at the Leeds Corn Exchange to showcase the city’s 33 distinctive and diverse wards as part of LEEDS 2023.

Transcript

00:00 My name is Keith Kahn, I'm the artist who created this project,

00:04 which is the culmination of a very large project

00:08 that's been happening throughout the city of Leeds in this year.

00:11 And this is the culmination of all the elements of the project

00:14 brought together at the Leeds Corn Exchange.

00:16 This project is a telling of the whole 33 wards of Leeds.

00:21 My ambition was very inspired by the fact that there's this magical number

00:25 associated with Leeds, the number 33.

00:28 And I used to work in Carnival,

00:31 and used to do a lot of stuff with people and communities.

00:34 So I was thinking in a digital age,

00:36 how do you make something that can engage people

00:40 and is really very, very local?

00:42 So with this project, I visited a lot of the 33 wards,

00:47 met the local hosts who have some knowledge of the area,

00:51 and was inspired by each of the wards that I visited.

00:56 Talked and chatted to people, saw things,

00:59 and that came together as a series of designs.

01:02 The project was inspired by my creation of 33 symbols

01:08 that are the wards of Leeds.

01:10 That was then made into a textile and also a digital animation.

01:15 And that textile was then worn by the people of Leeds

01:19 in all the 33 wards, which are also shown here as a series of photographs.

01:25 We made long, long, and then medium length,

01:29 and then short to kind of style all that together.

01:33 To see actually these 33 individual areas,

01:38 it's actually quite a lot.

01:40 And then also, it's really nice to represent

01:43 all these different characters on the motif,

01:46 which is beautifully designed.

01:51 And then you could kind of talk about the motif,

01:55 I think, with your friends and neighbours, which is quite nice.

01:59 I like people to visit and see it and feel something.

02:03 The symbols are kind of divided into both

02:06 a lot to do with the textile industry and the history of Leeds,

02:10 but they're also ones that are anecdotal.

02:13 So Karen from Hunslet was telling me that she lives in a block of flats,

02:18 but she can always see birds from her balcony.

02:22 So that's there.

02:24 And there's a little animal theme going on

02:26 with hair hills, hares, and birds.

02:30 So there's a combination of architecture or architectural themes

02:35 and personal stories, and that's where they kind of intersect.

02:38 It's been made by Burberry,

02:40 and the quality of these things is really beautiful.

02:43 There's something lovely about these.

02:45 It's kind of very local, and then also this connection with industry

02:49 and the connection with the city.

02:51 So it's not like an exhibition where you won't understand it.

02:54 The great thing about this, you'll come in and you will understand what you're seeing.

02:58 It's not something that's pretentious, put it that way.

03:01 It's something accessible and fun. It's clothes, too.

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