Sohei Nishino, 'The Diorama Map Series', Michael Hoppen Gallery

 The re-imagined cityscape of an urban flâneur. 

Sohei Nishino’s immense photographic dioramas reify an arresting fusion of past and present, expanse and detail, indexicality and fiction. Like a modern-day flâneur, the Japanese artist trod his way through major global cities, taking thousands of photographs spread across hundreds of rolls of black and white film. He then returned to his studio where he developed the film, dissected whole images and pieced selected fragments together and finally reshot the collage to form his urban topography of memory. Each diorama integrates prestigious landmarks into the wider cityscape. The concrete repositories of history and institutional memory are displayed alongside images selected by the artist for personal or aesthetic reasons, entrenching his personal representation of memory in the reconstructed physical landscape of the city. The  ‘strange tissue of space and time’ the philosopher Walter Benjamin associated with the aura of an artwork seems particularly appropriate in a description of a work that is both strikingly (post) modern in its fragmentary deconstruction and reconstitution process, yet displays elegantly archaic elements reminiscent of pictorialism; at a glance the diorama series resembles the hand-drawn maps of times gone by.  Monumentality and finesse combine in an auratic re-experiencing of the city.