Ideas travel faster than light brings into the garden a reflection on the idea and question of the complex material connections between places, people and shared space on a global scale. The exhibition emerges from a collaboration between the Mecklenburgh Square Garden Project (initiated by Clair Joy in 2012) and Jasone Miranda-Bilbao's project Ideas travel faster than light (from 2015).

For this iteration, Jasone invited ten artists based in India to submit proposals for new works, accompanied by instructions for their making. Clair, in turn, invited ten artists from the UK and Canada to create these works in the garden, each according to their own interpretation and understanding.

As a modus operandi that establishes relations across distance, this exhibition feels uncannily timely in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, it does not claim to point to the injustices of the world nor to offer a solution to the pressing problems that face us. Its relation to aesthetics and to what lies behind the artwork is somewhat different. It constitutes a relational configuration that stretches and contracts and re-addresses the balance between the work of art and the ideas that generate it in a way that does not give authority to the power of one mode of production over the power of the other.

Co-curated by Clair Joy and Jasone Miranda-Bilbao.