Craig’s practice reflects his regular travels between the UK, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. Works shown are works in progress, exploring what the French Anthropologist Marc Augé terms ‘non-place’ in his 1992 essay Non-Place, An Introduction to Super-modernity. For Augé we are spending an increasing proportion of our lives in ‘non’ places, such as in supermarkets, on motorways, in airports and in hotels. Since his essay was published we are also occupying a ‘digital non-place’ provided to us by our smart phones. Airport Portraits show passengers trying to break out of the ‘non-place’ of the airport by taking solitude in ‘digital non-place’. However, both are “spaces of circulation, consumption and communication’.
In Self Portrait, Anonymous Hotel, Craig is beginning to take his work from the airport into another ‘non-place’ — the hotel. Both offer the transitory occupant the illusion of being part of something bigger, of a space where they are uncannily a global citizen, ’always and never, at home’. Augé uses the concept of ‘super-modernity’ to describe our current condition of excessive information and excessive space. In global capitalism this is epitomised, perhaps, with the neon-signs of the headquarters of multi-national conglomerates. These signs seek to anchor an institution in space. However, many of these cityscapes are beginning to look the same, as suggested by Craig’s large 35 mm double exposure of two Asian cities (Untitled).