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Alpha Street Gallery
A temporary open-air gallery along Alpha Street, holding one of the Foreshore's busiest walking routes while a safer street is designed for it.
A gallery on the busiest pavement nobody designed
Alpha Street Gallery is an open-air exhibition mounted along the fence line of Alpha Street, between Lower Long and Lower Loop. Work hangs at eye level on the palisade, with no gallery, no door and no opening hours. Its audience is whoever happens to be walking past, which on this street is a great many people.
The photographs come from across the continent, by photographers working in Kenya, Madagascar, Nigeria, Mauritius, Egypt, South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Ghana, Morocco and Mali. They are pictures of ordinary working life: market traders, transit, street vendors, a city at night. Hung on a commuter route, they put the working life of other African cities alongside the working life passing in front of them.
Why this street
Alpha Street is the broken link in a route that is otherwise walkable end to end. Our own foot counts recorded more than 1 000 pedestrians an hour at peak on Alpha Street alone, most of them commuting between the station and the Waterfront and Port. What the street offers them is a narrow gravel path in place of a pavement, and no safe way to cross Lower Long.
It also sits on the walking route that connects the National Gallery to Zeitz MOCAA, which makes it a gap in the Inner City Art Walk as well as a gap in the commute.
Art holding the space
The gallery is temporary by design. It occupies the street while the planning permissions are worked through for a road diet that would give Alpha Street a proper pedestrian path, on the same trial basis as the Bree Street Experiment: reversible, measured, and changed on the evidence.
The work argues its own case. Every photograph of the installation is also a photograph of the crowd moving past it, so the exhibition documents the exact thing it was put there to demonstrate. The pedestrian volume stops being a number in a report and becomes something you can see.
Photographs by the exhibiting artists. Installation photographed by Mat Slater, Slater Studio.
On the street, right now
Tap the pin for directions — go stand on it.
WHAT'S NEXT
A road diet is proposed for Alpha Street: reducing it to one lane with access kept for parking and loading, on the same trial basis as the Bree Street Experiment, so it can be extended, changed or removed on the evidence. It sits with the City for the permissions that would make it possible, and our data team will measure what changes.
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