Effie Paleologou’s photographs explore the secret life of cities after dark, their mysteriousness and sense of imminent danger. This is a radically different narrative to the one found in tourist brochures.

The photographs speak to the bleakness of 4 am, to the visual revelations of waking in the night and finding that the familiar landscape of the bedroom has become a space full of ornate, menacing shadows; only now it is the coastal townscape that has turned into a nightmarish space.

Along with Magali Nougarede’s Toeing the Line, this is the culmination of a project involving two photographers and the coastal communities of Hastings and Eastbourne.

The focal point of the commission was the representation of the familiar through the eyes of strangers, using new relationships between artists and communities to encourage people to rediscover and develop a renewed experience of place through walking and seeing.