Would love to know who is behind this street display in Hackney. On first glance, this row of portraits look like they must be an assortment of random Hackney characters, but on closer inspection, the contexts look 'other' rather than the people inhabiting those places, which makes them even more intriguing.
I am reminded of Jaques Rancierre's wiring on 'Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community,' and given an excuse, unapologetic of the wild trajectory, to quote a whole paragraph, as does he, from Deleuze and Guattari's book, What is a Philosopher? To this day, I have yet to read a better definition of what artists do:
The writer twists language, makes it vibrate, seizes hold of it, and rends it in order to wrest the percept from perceptions, the affect from affections, the sensation from opinion - in view, one hopes, of that still missing people....This is, precisely, the task of all art and, from colours and sounds, new plastic or melodic landscapes, and new rhythmic characters that raise them to the height of earth's song and cry of humanity: that which constitutes tone, health, becoming, a visual and sonorous bloc. A monument does not commemorate or celebrate something that happened but confides to the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event: the constantly renewed suffering of men and women, their re-created protestations, their constantly resumed struggle. Will this all be in vain because suffering is eternal and revolutions do not survive their victory? But the success of a revolution resides only in itself, precisely the vibrations, clinches, and openings it gave to men and women that it is always in the process of becoming, like those tumuli to which each new traveller adds a stone.
(Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. by Graham Burchel and Hugh Tomlinson, London: Verso, 1994, p.76.)
