MIRRORCITY: 20 London artists, Hayward Gallery

The concept
The Hayward’s MIRRORCITY aims to explore the way new technologies have shaped the way we interact with and experience our environment, specifically the throbbing metropolis that is 21st century London. The curator, Stephanie Rosenthal, has spent the last year touring over a hundred studios used by artists who make work in and about London. What she found was a city teeming with ideas about how technology has modified the urban environment and our navigation of it. 
The resulting show is a survey of work that explores the space between the physical and the virtual, asking questions about the way technology makes us form new relationships with our urban habitat. Artists concerned with politics, perception, science fiction, psychology and behavioural science all rub shoulders in an attempt to discern if the line between the virtual and the real still exists or if it has already dissolved. What is really exciting about this exhibition is that it is full of artists who make their work about places and events that Londoners will have personal experience of. 
The artists
Perhaps inevitability in a show about contemporary technology, Rosenthal has largely plumped for youth over experience. For one or two, Lloyd Corporation and Emma McNally for example, this will be the first time their work has been shown in a major gallery. Other participants, like Pil and Galia Kollectiv and Lindsay Seers have perhaps not had the exposure and recognition their work deserves. However, the star names include 2013 Turner Prize winner Laure Prouvost, the painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and South London artists’ group LuckyPDF. 
Also watch out for a specially created performance by Nicola Conibere, Frank Bock and Martin Hargreaves involving an actor performing as an African street vendor on the Southbank.