"Light Industry"

Laurenz Berges, Guido Guidi, Craigie Horsfield, Gerry Johansson, Morgan Levy, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Roger Palmer, Mark Ruwedel, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg

Exhibition: 19 September – 15 November 2025

"Light Industry" brings together the work of nine artists and photographers, across generations who have worked within the theme of industry. Each of them has focused their lens on human interaction with machines or large tools, industrial areas and their architecture, building sites or labour itself and the traces of these in post-industrial landscapes from the US to Russia, to Sweden, Italy, England and Wales. Viewed collectively, "Light Industry" explores how industries, past and present, and of various scales and levels of visibility, continue to impact our bodies and shape the wider environment.

Caught between excessive expansion and disappearance through decline or deliberate obscuration, the mundane, lived reality of industry in this moment, seems to have fallen out of focus or been temporarily lost from view. In turning to the overlooked and forgotten traces of industry, "Light Industry" brings our relationship to different modes of production back into focus. In doing so, it asks us to reacquaint ourselves, both with the people on whose hard labour industry depends but also with the tactile sensibility and physicality of materials whether found in industrial architecture, post-industrial landscapes or on the surfaces of a print.

For a period of two weeks, the exhibition extends outside the gallery to two large billboards across the Caledonian Road, next to the railway bridge, with artwork by Rut Blees Luxemburg and Morgan Levy.

Laurenz Berges (b. 1966, Cloppenburg, Germany) lives in Düsseldorf. Berges' photographic work focuses primarily on transience, and the space between use and decay. Berges studied under Bernd Becher and spent a year assisting Evelyn Hofer in the 1980’s.

Guido Guidi (b. 1941, Cesena, Italy) lives in Cesena. Guido Guidi is one of Italy’s most respected photographers, with a career spanning more than five decades. He has mostly focused his lens on rural and suburban geographies close to his home.

Craigie Horsfield (b. 1949, Cambridge, UK) lives in London. Horsfield’s work combines film, photography, sound, drawing, and is most well-known for his large-scale, unique prints. He often prints the photographs many years after they were first taken, bringing into contrast memory and the present reality.

Gerry Johansson (b. 1945, Örebro, Sweden) lives in Höganäs. Johansson is one of Sweden’s most renowned photographers. Working mostly in black and white, and favouring the square format, Johansson is attracted to the neglected details of urban space.

Morgan Levy (b. 1985, Philadelphia, USA) lives in New York. Levy combines performance, staged photography and documentary approaches, often working in partnership with her collaborators. Levy is informed by canonical 20th century images of work and labour in America, and feminist photographic practices from the 1970s onwards.

Rut Blees Luxemburg (b. 1967, Germany) lives in London. Blees Luxemburg is Professor of Urban Aesthetics at the Royal College of Art. She re-envisions cities through large-scale photographic works, public art installations, and operatic productions.

Roger Palmer (b. 1946, Portsmouth, UK) lives in Glasgow. Working as an artist and educator since the 1970s, Palmer's research and practice have contributed to debates on the representation of place, as well as ideas of location and dislocation, migration and settlement.

Mark Ruwedel (b. 1954, Bethlehem, USA) lives in Los Angeles. Working primarily in the western territories of the US and Canada, Ruwedel's work explores how geological, historical and political events leave their marks on the landscape. Merging documentary and conceptual methods, he also finds influence in land art echoed in his images of abandoned railways, nuclear testing sites and empty desert homes.

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg (b. 1938, Berlin, Germany) lives in Düsseldorf. Schulz-Dornburg grew up in the aftermath of the Second World War. Since the 1970s, she has sought out places of transit and borderlands, locations geographically and politically caught up in a state of in-between.

Lucy Rogers (text) is an artist, writer and researcher. She has just completed her PhD on the archive of the photographer, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg.