Antony Cairns 'illum'

Encounter is pleased to announce Antony Cairns: illum opening on 20th November 2025. The exhibition presents a distilled selection of Cairns’ ongoing CTY series in which photographs of the night-time metropolis are printed on collections of tinted IBM computer punch cards. From the minute to the monumental, this archive of captivating images acts as a starting point for the artist’s wider creative exploration of the history of photographic reproduction, experimental printing methods and the aesthetics of abstraction. Cairns’ work occupies a unique space between photography, installation and assemblage. At the core of the artist’s practice is a fascination with the process by which the metaphorical potential of the photographic image can be extended through innovative methods of reproduction and repetition. As such, in this new collection of works, fragmentary images and abstracted shapes are constantly refigured in intriguing compositional formats.

Cairns’ powerful dystopian visions of urban centres are devoid of people and have their root in stills captured in London, New York, Las Vegas, Seoul, Tokyo and Busan from 2014-2024 on a Minox 35I camera, first introduced in 1974. In his experiments with antiquated photographic technologies and in the rhythmic recycling of archival material, the places Cairns captures become abstracted both in their form and location, distorted and non-linear, creating a unique atmosphere. Through investigations with complex methods of image making -- such as the effect of light on 35mm black and white film transparencies—the focus moves from the specificity of the architectural forms captured, to the hazy and peripheral spaces which exist between them. The sites Cairns records thus become amorphous, a sprawling maze of structures, voids and shapes. Imbued with a general sense of urbanized space and the ambience of a metropolis at night, the hazy, nebulous imagery disrupts the sharp, recognisable architectural structures of the city and begins to bleed into abstract ‘shapes of light’. What was once familiar is thus re-visioned and made strange, transformed by having been subject to a reverse technological torque.

Cairns’ cities, visually evoke the imagined worlds of an unsettling, uncanny future sometimes evident in science fiction. Often, the architectural structures the artist focuses on are still in construction, representing little more than skeletons of the office buildings and apartments that they are destined to become. Cairns’ practice is continually engaged in a process of construction and deconstruction, as he seeks to capture technologies and urban landscapes in a continuous state of flux. This temporal unease gestures towards framing both the modern city and its dark subconscious.

Cairns began his IBM series in 2016, drawing on a growing personal collection of outmoded and discarded forms of technology. This linked to his ongoing fascination with the predigital world and the evolution of computing. Introduced in 1928, the ‘IBM Computer Card’ was one of the most important technological innovations in early computing, serving as a key medium for data recording and storage for half a century. In the IBM series, Cairns’ ink jet prints images directly onto recycled collections of 1960-70s IBM punch cards, creatively repurposing them by visually embedding new forms onto what had previously become outmoded and unreadable containers of information. These pictures, once fused with the cards, are segmented, layered and reassembled to take on a new life as contemporary relics which both complicate the identity of the original image as well as the legibility of the object on which it is printed.

Cairns regards image-making as a form of time travel and in this manner, he subversively plays with both the notion of history and the idea of the archive. Fundamentally the artist’s work interrogates states of temporal disjuncture, sitting at an intersection between analogue and digital, past and present. Depending on the generation of the person viewing the works, the punch cards may appear familiar, unrecognizable or somewhere between what is remembered and forgotten. Through his exploration of both our technological past and contemporary present, Cairns gestures towards a precarious future, in which once familiar places become re-visioned under the haze of artificial light. Antony Cairns: ilum runs until 31st January 2026.

Exhibition Page at Encounter

'Shape of Light': Antony Cairns at Tate (video)

Biography

Antony Cairns (1980, London, UK) works across photography, installation and sculpture. Preoccupied with the material process of photography and its intrinsic interplay with technology, at the root of Cairns’ practice is the fusing of advanced means of image reproduction with traditional processes. Cairns’ powerful dystopian visions of urban centres are devoid of people and have their root in stills captured in London, New York, Las Vegas, Tokyo and Busan. This archive of captivating images acts as a starting point for the artist’s wider creative exploration of the history of photographic reproduction, experimental printing methods and the aesthetics of abstraction.

Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include; '‘illum’, Encounter, Lisbon (2025), 'Night City’, Saint Laurent Babylone, Paris (2025), ‘PXL CTY’, Sous Les Etoiles Gallery, New York (2024), ‘PXL CTY,’ The Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (2023), ‘PXL CTY’, Akio Nagasawa, Tokyo (2023), ‘CTY 5081’, Encounter, Lisbon (2022, ‘CTY_TYO3 TYO4’, Webber, London (2021), ‘TY03TY04’, Akio Nagasawa, Tokyo (2021), ‘CTY-TY03’, Stieglitz 19, Antwerp (2020), ‘Touchstone’, The Photographers Gallery, London (2019), ‘CTY’, Akio Nagasawa, Tokyo (2019), ‘The Tale of Gordon Earl Adams’, Theatre de Verdure, Switzerland (2018), ‘TYO2-LDN4’, Roman Road, London (2017). Selected group exhibitions include; ‘Artist Rooms’, Encounter, Lisbon (2025), ‘After the end of History’, Hayward Gallery Touring, United Kingdom (2024), ‘New Acquisitions’, Photography Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2023), ‘Civilisation - The way we live now’, Saatchi Gallery, London (2023), ‘What Remains’ Encounter, London (2021), ‘Expired’ Sara Kay Gallery, New York (2019), ‘Artificial Impressions’, Stedelijk Museum Breda (2018), ‘Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art’, Tate Modern, London (2018), ‘London Nights’, Museum of London, London (2018), ‘A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age’, George Eastman Museum, New York (2016), ‘Abstracts’, Copperfield, London (2015), ‘Memory Lab – Photography Challenges History’, Mudam, Luxembourg (2015), ‘Collected Shadows’ Polygon Gallery, Vancouver (2013), ‘ICP Triennial’ International Centre for Photography, New York (2013). In 2015 Cairns won the prestigious Hariban Award.

His work can be found in important public and private collections internationally including The Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Victoria and Albert Museum, George Eastman Museum, Archive of Modern Conflict and Tate Library.

Antony Cairns 'illum'

20.11.25 - 31.01.26