Common Places: Cultural Identity in the Urban Environment by Mikael Levin

Common Places explored how cultural identity is manifest in ordinary urban spaces. Selecting four typical European cities—Katrineholm, Sweden; Cambrai, France; Erfurt, Germany; Thessaloniki, Greece—that range in size from small town to small city, Mikael Levin documented the way traces of each city’s distinctive history mix with the everyday, reflecting not only current cultural and economic cross-influences, but also an ambiguity about the past and future. The exhibition consisted of two bodies of work that played off each other. One set of photographs, presented as eight large-format prints from each city, looked at the commonalities between the four cities. The second body of work, presented in four albums of various dimensions, featured photographs of one particular, distinctive aspect of the city. Levin exhibited Common Places in each of the four cities, each time soliciting response texts written from the perspective of that city.