Full Scale: Exhibition Road is a series of ink drawings on polyester film. Each piece will show the thin outline (0.13mm ink dots) of impacts of stray bombs, grenades, and machine-gun bullets. The outlines are drawn on translucent polyester. Underneath this layer will be a graph paper with (1×1 mm meshes, red grid) that is still used for technical drawings and architectural plans. The outlines are taken from transfer prints originating from external walls in the Exhibition Road in London, Kensington.
By the mere use of materials (graph paper, tracing paper, architecture ink), the work stressed the fact that a conscious plan preceded the massive destruction through stray bombs and rockets. Most probably, the weapons that damaged the buildings on the Exhibition Road (including the Victoria and Albert Museum) have been drafted on a very similar sort of graph paper that now allows to exactly—millimeter per millimeter—reconstruct the scale of the damage that was caused on the building‘s outside walls.
It refers to ambivalence of systemic destructions that are drafted, planned, calculated, and “constructed” as we are used from the works of architects and engineers. Technology separates the “gunman” from his gun. Pulling a trigger does not mean facing the death of others. It became a highly mediated act that does not differ much from everyday life gestures of pushing a button, clicking a link, and wiping on a screen.
Furthermore, the work emphasizes through the hardly visible outlines that these huge intentional damages, and the preceding events, do not belong to our contemporary thinking anymore. Although the Exhibition Road seems to be the aorta of the 19th-century exhibition district erected for the British Exhibition, the walls’ traces and marks are not consciously recognized as damage. They belong to the building without being perceived as traces of a painful history chapter.
