Exhibitions

Venue: Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds

Dates: 11th February–26th April 2009

Notes: touring, curated by Alistair Robinson

“How can we fathom the extent to which equity gaps are growing despite unprecedented global wealth and technological progress? Drawing images is one way to engage more of our imagination to help understand the extent and arrangement of world inequalities… You can say it, you can prove it, you can tabulate it, but it is only when you show it that it hits home.”

Professor Daniel Dorling, University of Sheffield, ‘The Challenge: Understanding Global Inequalities’

“When Englishmen set out to describe their society, they begin by making distinctions, by classifying and ranking… This mental habit… is of the first significance. It bears witness to the fact that the most fundamental structural characteristic of English society was its high degree of stratification, its distinctive and all-pervasive system of social inequality… [of] hierarchical distinctions of status, rank and power. Order, degree, rank and hierarchy seemed self-evident, even natural…a scheme of ranks or degrees, of hierarchically arranged social categories were intended to simplify the complexity of reality and clearly distinguish the principal social groups.”

Prof. Keith Wrightson, “The social order of early modern England: three approaches”, 1986

‘Rank’ brings together diverse artistic practices which address the problem of imagining and visualizing the wider society and wider world around us – of how we imaginatively order and classify the social world around us. As ‘society’ is by definition an abstraction – an aggregation of persons – every individual of necessity must adapt some scheme of classification or imaginative model of the world to make sense of it. How could we best picture our own worldview?

The exhibition brings together works from six centuries across the English speaking world, which visualize our relations to one another. The exhibition brings together images by artists and anonymous artisans; contemporaries and historical figures; and hard data by academic sociologists such as Professor Daniel Darling; from their tanks and research institutes such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation; from global institutions such as the World Bank; and government agencies such as the Office for National Statistics.