Output details

The seventh billion citizen

This five-screen video work was conceived and produced by Harland and Gillett as part of a larger funded project with the University of Southampton’s ESRC Centre for Population Change. Having produced the European element of the video, Harland and Gillett commissioned artists from the other four significant centres of world population, to produce an element, working to a given template.

The project responds to the announcement by the UN of the birth of the seven billionth citizen on 31 October 2011, and arises from discussions with population specialists, addressing the global impact of population trends. The cross-disciplinary collaboration established a method for knowledge exchange between researchers in fine art and demography, which evolved over a two-year period and was managed through a series of presentations of data and interpretation by researchers in each discipline (with events open to students at the University). The research asks: How might artists from around the world, working on a collective artwork, deliver effective audience engagement with pressing demographic and ecological issues? Using the historical painted formula of the ‘sublime’, Caspar David Friedrich’s figure in an immense landscape, as a template for contemporary video production, the piece addresses concern for the individual, in the face of overwhelming collective and societal challenges.

The video was launched in a five-room installation at Townhouse gallery, Cairo, followed by a presentation as part of picture/tableau/screen, Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury. The second stage of the project was a new exhibition, The Seven Billionth Citizen, with a catalogue, curated by Harland and Gillett based around and including the video piece, with additional video works by three artists, and a series of five paintings by Harland. This exhibition toured in 2013 to venues in Southampton and Cambridge UK and Porto Alegre, Brazil.