Shop Awnings, Removed From the Street and Rebuilt

Egon Van Herreweghe's works at Footnote Gallery lift shop awnings out of the street and install them as sculpture. Stripped of shade, rain and a shop name, the canopy remains only as shape, fabric and colour, and the displacement itself is most of the intervention.

Awnings are the densest layer of urban imagery and the least examined. What gives a street its character is rarely facade architecture; it is the colour, height and projection of its canopies and the lettering across them, all decided by shopkeepers rather than planners. Isolating that layer makes it readable again — photography has done the same thing since the Becher typologies, though Van Herreweghe brings the object instead of representing it. Istanbul has a direct stake in the question: every attempt at standardised signage there reduces visual clutter and erases the disorder that makes a street recognisable.