Langlands & Bell are two artists who work collaboratively. Ben Langlands (born London 1955) and Nikki Bell (born London 1959), began collaborating in 1978, while studying Fine Art at Middlesex Polytechnic in North London, from 1977 to 1980.
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Artistic practice and career
Their artistic practice ranges from sculpture, film and video, to innovative digital media projects, and full-scale architecture. Their work focuses on the complex web of relationships linking people with architecture and the built environment, and on a wider global level, the coded systems of mass-communications and exchange we use to negotiate an increasingly fast-changing technological world.
Their first collaboration, in 1978, was an installation called The kitchen, consisting of two side-by-side kitchens, one created by Langlands and the other by Bell.
In the mid-1980s, they became known for making monochromatic sculptures and reliefs, often in the form of furniture or architectural models, which employed an analytical and almost archeological approach to architecture and design typologies to explore human social interaction in terms ranging from the personal, to the socio-aesthetic, and socio-political.
Langlands & Bell have exhibited internationally throughout their career including in exhibitions at Tate Britain and Tate Modern, the Imperial War Museum, the Serpentine Gallery, and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, at IMMA, Dublin, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany, MoMA, New York, the Central House of the Artist, Moscow, Venice Biennale, Seoul Biennale, and CCA Kitakyushu and TN Probe, Tokyo in Japan.
Their work was first purchased by Charles Saatchi in 1990 and 1991 from exhibitions at Maureen Paley Interim Art, London. It was subsequently exhibited in the first of the Young British Artists exhibitions at the Saatchi Collection, Boundary Road in 1992, and again in the 1997 Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. Sensation toured to the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin and the Brooklyn Museum, New York in 1998/99.
In 1996-1997, a major survey exhibition Langlands & Bell Works 1986–1996 co-curated by the Serpentine Gallery, London, and Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany also toured to Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa, Palermo, Italy, and Koldo Mitxelena, San Sebastián, Spain.
In 2002, Langlands & Bell were commissioned by the Art Commissions Committee of the Department of Art at the Imperial War Museum, London, to travel to Afghanistan to research "The Aftermath of September 11 and the War in Afghanistan".
In 2004, they won the BAFTA Award (British Academy of Film & Television Arts) for Interactive Arts Installation for The House of Osama bin Laden, the trilogy of art works resulting from their visit. The group of works includes an interactive computer animation examining the house near Jalalabad occupied by Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s. In 2004 Langlands & Bell were also short-listed for the Turner Prize for the same work. A few days before the exhibition opened the film Zardad's Dog which constituted a third of their presentation was withdrawn due to legal advice received by Tate that it was sub-judice because of the impending trial of Faryadi Sarwar Zardad, a former Afghan warlord at the Old Bailey.
The largest artworks to date by Langlands & Bell are, the 2004 Paddington Basin Bridge, designed in association with Atelier One (structural engineers), an 8-metre high x 45-metre long white metal and glass pedestrian bridge linking Paddington station and the new Paddington Basin Development, London, with a capacity of up to 20,000 people per day; Moving World (Night & Day) 2007, two 6 x 18-metre permanent outdoor sculptures of steel, glass, and digitally controlled neon at London Heathrow, Terminal 5; and China, Language of Places 2009, the 18-metre wall painting exhibited in English Lounge at Tang Contemporary Art, 798, Beijing in 2009.
Artworks by Langlands & Bell are in the permanent collections of many prominent international art museums including the British Museum, Imperial War Museum, Tate and the V&A in London, MoMA, New York, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and the Yale Center for British Art, USA, and the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia.
In 2012 to go alongside the AKA Peace Exhibition at the ICA Art Below showcased selected works from the AKA Peace series on the London Underground including Langlands & Bell. "AKA Peace" originally conceived by photographer Bran Symondson and now curated by artist Jake Chapman, is an exhibition of new works made specially for The Peace One Day Project 2012, bringing together a group of Contemporary Artists, all of whom agreed to transform a decommissioned AK-47 assault rifle, refashioning into artworks.
Personal lives
Langlands and Bell live in a four-storey Georgian house in Whitechapel, East London, which they bought in 1982. They took 18 months out of their careers between 1987 and 1989 to renovate the house and expand their workspace.