Antony Cairns (b. 1980, London, UK ; lives and works in London)

MaViCa: Tokyo Blue (2025)

MaViCa: Tokyo Blue (2025) sets a city imagined as the future against a technology that has already become its past. Sony MaViCa cameras, suspended within a floating structure, continuously display Cairns’s photographs of Tokyo. Once imagined as the future of photography, the MaViCa now exists as an obsolete image-making device, caught between camera and screen, object and image. In Cairns’s photographs, Tokyo appears similarly suspended: buildings dissolve into light, architecture becomes abstraction, and the city flickers between presence and memory. Together, camera and city form an afterimage of technological promise — a luminous space where the future has already become history.

Antony Cairns works across photography, installation, and sculpture, exploring the material and technological conditions of image-making. Working with the ambient glow of cities at night, he photographs urban environments including London, New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Seoul, and Busan, transforming architecture into fractured, luminous abstractions. Cairns treats photography as both image and object, combining analogue processes, experimental printing, and digital interventions. His practice frequently engages obsolete technologies and data carriers. By repurposing these once-essential technologies, Cairns examines shifting relationships between image, object, archive, and technological progress.

Selected solo exhibitions include: The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2019); Akio Nagasawa Gallery, Tokyo (2019); Théâtre de Verdure, Vevey (2018); Roman Road, London (2017); Stieglitz 19, Antwerp (2017); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2013). Selected group exhibitions include: Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2023); Saatchi Gallery, London (2023); Hayward Gallery, UK (2024); Tate Modern, London (2018); Stedelijk Museum, Breda (2018); Museum of London, London (2018); International Centre of Photography, New York (2013). His work is held in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, George Eastman Museum and Archive of Modern Conflict.

Since it’s initial founding in 2011 as an artist-led project space and adjacent studios, Cob has committed itself to embolden and nurture multidisciplinary UK emerging talent. Cob’s core programming centres around a roster of UK-based artists whilst simultaneously inviting international practitioners to exhibit in London, often as their UK debut. Cob further supports artists with off-site projects and installations as well as editions and publications.
In 2023, the gallery launched an on site residency programme offered to two artists annually to develop their artistic practice and realise ambitious projects.