Athen Kardashian & Nina Mhach Durban: I have often walked down this street before, but the pavement always stayed beneath my feet

Echoing the collaged aesthetic of urban high-streets, each side of the sculpture frames imagery and ephemera that combine diasporic aesthetics with the informal, everyday beauty of the left-behind, the handmade and the tactile: nail charms embedded in mortar, window drawings made from dust, hand-written postcards, dremelled padlocks and imagery remixed from the artists’ personal archive into faded shop signs. For Kardashian and Durban, these intimate moments reflect the poetic accidents and decay of materiality inherent to the shifting communities of our high-streets, the emotions and memories they rouse, as well as broader themes of transformation, identity and belonging.

Over the course of the summer, the artists pay further homage to how a city ages and changes by inviting public contributions to sculpture: in exchange for a donation toward Pecan, a community development charity based in Peckham, you are invited to write a card to post through the sculpture’s letterbox and select an inscribed padlock to add to its growing facade of Love Locks. In each case, offering visitors the chance to contribute a personal votive to the city, proposing new forms of preservation through accumulation, layering and quiet intimacy.

The commission title references lyrics to the romantic ballad ‘On the Street Where You Live’ from the 1956 musical, My Fair Lady. Set in a London of rigid class distinctions, the singer talks of his ‘towering feelings’ for an East End woman who aspires to work at a florist shop by escaping her cockney accent. Expressing overwhelming love for the place in which she lives, the song goes on to ask, ‘Does enchantment pour out of ev’ry door?’. This reference, whilst filled with romanticism and desire, equally highlights increasingly vexed and contemporary questions of urbanisation, class, collective care and social erasure in the city.