calendario eventi  :: 

X

28/1/2012

Two exhibitions

Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham

Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency
Common Assembly

Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency (DAAR) is an art and architecture collective set up by Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal and Eyal Weizman, based in Palestine. Their work is a critical examination of the role played by architecture in the occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Their work imagines the “decolonization” of Palestine through new uses for oppressive Israeli infrastructure. The evacuated Israeli military fortress of Oush Grab becomes a public park and a haven for starlings, storks and birds of prey that use the site to rest while migrating - birds recognise no national boundaries. A surburban-looking Israeli settlement - one of many heavily guarded hilltop outposts aggressively encroaching on Palestinian territories in the guise of innocent family dwellings - is redesigned as an interconnected community living space.

The centrepiece of their exhibition is a life-sized section through the abandoned Palestinian Parliament in a suburb of Jerusalem - a parliament that has never been used. Construction started during the 1996 Oslo Accord when peace seemed possible and was halted in 2003 after the Second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, marked the failure of the political process. The project began with the discovery that – mistakenly or intentionally – the building was constructed on Israel’s unilaterally declared border within Jerusalem. The parliament is partly within Israeli territory and partly within Palestinian controlled land – a small strip, no wider than the border line, is in legal limbo.

DAAR will build the section of the abandoned Palestine Parliament that the border line crosses in three dimensions. This suspended and elongated structure will act as a forum for debate on the future of Palestine during the exhibition. How can political participation be organised for a partially exiled and geographically dispersed people? Palestine’s complex and developing nationhood offers the opportunity to think beyond the nation state as conceived and imposed by former European colonial powers.

DAAR projects have been shown at the Venice and Istanbul Biennales, Tate in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, among many others. In 2010 DAAR was awarded the Prince Claus Prize for Architecture.

Common Assembly is a project by Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, Eyal Weizman, Nicola Perugini with Yazeed Anani, Nishat Awan, Ghassan Bannoura, Benoit Burquel, Suzy Harris-Brandts, Runa Johannessen, Zografia Karekou, Cressida Kocienski, Lejla Odobasic, Carina Ottino, Elizabeth Paden, Sameena Sitabkhan, Amy Zion.

-----

Thomas Demand
Model Studies

Acclaimed German artist Thomas Demand is best known for his large scale photographs that question the medium as a faithful record of reality. His exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary is a result of a residency at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles where he discovered the archive of the celebrated architect John Lautner (1911 – 1994). Lautner’s glamorous and curvaceous homes have featured in many films, including the 1971 Bond film Diamonds Are Forever.

Demand himself has a keen interest in architecture. “Architecture has always been in the centre of my attention, because it deals with utopias and ideas of a somehow better future,” he has said. His own art involves making painstaking paper models of architectural interiors and other built environments and then photographing them. Despite the absence of people and his often deceptively ordinary scenes, they are loaded with significance. He has made models of the Oval Office of the US President, the tunnel in Paris where Princess Diana had her fatal accident and a Florida counting station where a contested vote in 2000 elected George W.Bush instead of Al Gore.

Demand’s exhibition is based on 12 architectural models he discovered in the Lautner archive. Demand’s own models are destroyed immediately after he has photographed them. “They have one peak of perfectness, of immaculate beauty, sometimes just for a day or two. If you don’t catch the shot on that day, it’s gone,” he has said. In contrast Lautner’s models are old, bruised and well-used, a humble counterpoint to his heroic, spectacular architecture.

This is the first time that Demand has photographed models that are not his own. Depicting them from many angles, he establishes an intimate relationship with them that is independent of the buildings they refer to. “I tried to avoid making images of architecture,” Demand writes. “It’s the sculptural presence, and the traces of someone’s practice, of understanding and remodelling, which raised my attention.” Demand’s beautiful photographs also recall the history of 20th century art. The lines, planes, textures and colours he composes from the models recall Modern painting and sculpture, including Picasso’s reliefs, as well as mid-20th century abstract painting.

Born in 1964 in Munich Thomas Demand is one of Germany’s most prominent artists. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Serpentine Gallery in London and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, as well as representing Germany at the Venice Biennale of 2003. He has often collaborated with Caruso St John, architects
of Nottingham Contemporary, on the designs of his exhibitions.

With special thanks to Esther Schipper.

Opening 29 january

Nottingham Contemporary
Weekday Cross, Nottingham
Hours: Tuesday - Friday 10am - 7pm, Bank Holidays and Saturdays 10am - 6pm, Sunday 11am - 5pm. Closed on Mondays, except Bank Holidays during exhibitions. Galleries will be closed on the following dates in 2012 while exhibitions change over 9 - 27 January; 16 April - 4 May; 2 - 20 July; 1 - 19 September
Admission free

stampa

permanent link