The Church Street Partners’ Gazette is Istanbul-based artist Can Altay’s first solo exhibition in London. The exhibition will form a base for the development of a single edition newspaper, The Church Street Partners’ Gazette. The contents of the Gazette will be generated through local research and dialogues that will be conducted in the area throughout the duration of the exhibition. Altay will take The Showroom’s neighbourhood as a ‘stage’ where a cast of local ‘actors’ whose personal or professional knowledge or experiences of the area will contribute to the paper’s content.

The Partners’ Gazette will bring together material produced by the artist through dialogues with local people and other invited contributors. It will approach the ‘stage’ of the Church Street area as a whole, taking both an empirical view that looks at various concrete factors that shape the neighbourhood (such as the Paddington motorway flyover that physically dissects the area from the city “center”), and a more speculative approach related to the outcomes or by-products that factors such as these may cause.

Through considering objects, spaces and even the animals in the area as active participants, Altay’s newspaper will observe the various elements that coexist in the area. The main objective of the project is to propose a new partner – the Partners’ Gazette – which will work actively across the area in order to address the dynamics, relations, problems and potentials. It will underline the various ‘partners’ at play as the active agents in the area: the people, objects, architecture and events that have, over time, contributed to the way the area now is, and to what it can become in the future.

The Gazette will focus upon partners big and small, the fleeting, the student, the temporary laborer, the ring road and the curb, and the visible and invisible boundaries that define the area. It will take The Showroom as its center, housing meetings, gatherings, discussions, presentations, and other forms of exchange, which will lead to an expanding visual array of information about the locality, and an approach to the question of what ‘partnership’ might be.