The City Speaks

2017

The City Speaks was commissioned as part of Hull UK City of Culture 2017 and designed to act as a 21st century Speakers’ Corner in which open-air public speaking took on epic proportions as spoken words were translated to text and relayed on one of the towers supporting Hull’s tidal barrier.

Temporary Public Gallery

2010

In 2010 The Propeller Group rented a public billboard at a bus shelter in Ho Chi Minh City for 3 months to stage a public art project. A shrewd and insightful move in a country where all visual elements in the landscape— from public art to advertising—are controlled through different censorship bodies, Temporary Public Gallery was intended to explore matters concerning public space, public art, privatized commercial space and the politics/ censorship behind the regulation of these spaces in Ho Chi Minh City. This project began with the group’s interest in how the visual elements of a landscape not only reflect the socio-political changes of that locale, but can have an affect on it as well. Expressing a desire to see how they could contribute to this affect in the rapidly changing landscape of Viet Nam, the collective attempted to locate a loophole in the system by renting out advertising space to curate artworks in public, challenging notions of public space, advertising, and public art in Viet Nam.