Artist Keith Khan has launched ‘A City Without Seams’ at the Leeds Corn Exchange to showcase the city’s 33 distinctive and diverse wards as part of LEEDS 2023.
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00:00 My name is Keith Kahn, I'm the artist who created this project,
00:04 which is the culmination of a very large project
00:08 that's been happening throughout the city of Leeds in this year.
00:11 And this is the culmination of all the elements of the project
00:14 brought together at the Leeds Corn Exchange.
00:16 This project is a telling of the whole 33 wards of Leeds.
00:21 My ambition was very inspired by the fact that there's this magical number
00:25 associated with Leeds, the number 33.
00:28 And I used to work in Carnival,
00:31 and used to do a lot of stuff with people and communities.
00:34 So I was thinking in a digital age,
00:36 how do you make something that can engage people
00:40 and is really very, very local?
00:42 So with this project, I visited a lot of the 33 wards,
00:47 met the local hosts who have some knowledge of the area,
00:51 and was inspired by each of the wards that I visited.
00:56 Talked and chatted to people, saw things,
00:59 and that came together as a series of designs.
01:02 The project was inspired by my creation of 33 symbols
01:08 that are the wards of Leeds.
01:10 That was then made into a textile and also a digital animation.
01:15 And that textile was then worn by the people of Leeds
01:19 in all the 33 wards, which are also shown here as a series of photographs.
01:25 We made long, long, and then medium length,
01:29 and then short to kind of style all that together.
01:33 To see actually these 33 individual areas,
01:38 it's actually quite a lot.
01:40 And then also, it's really nice to represent
01:43 all these different characters on the motif,
01:46 which is beautifully designed.
01:51 And then you could kind of talk about the motif,
01:55 I think, with your friends and neighbours, which is quite nice.
01:59 I like people to visit and see it and feel something.
02:03 The symbols are kind of divided into both
02:06 a lot to do with the textile industry and the history of Leeds,
02:10 but they're also ones that are anecdotal.
02:13 So Karen from Hunslet was telling me that she lives in a block of flats,
02:18 but she can always see birds from her balcony.
02:22 So that's there.
02:24 And there's a little animal theme going on
02:26 with hair hills, hares, and birds.
02:30 So there's a combination of architecture or architectural themes
02:35 and personal stories, and that's where they kind of intersect.
02:38 It's been made by Burberry,
02:40 and the quality of these things is really beautiful.
02:43 There's something lovely about these.
02:45 It's kind of very local, and then also this connection with industry
02:49 and the connection with the city.
02:51 So it's not like an exhibition where you won't understand it.
02:54 The great thing about this, you'll come in and you will understand what you're seeing.
02:58 It's not something that's pretentious, put it that way.
03:01 It's something accessible and fun. It's clothes, too.