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27/4/2005

Can Buildings Curate

AA Gallery, London

An exhibition exploring the gallery setting as a perennial site of artistic, architectural and curatorial adventure

Featuring works by Michael Asher, Mathieu Copeland, David Cunningham, Davide Bertocchi, Décosterd & Rahm, Diller + Scofidio, Drabble + Sachs, Cerith Wyn Evans, Dee Ferris, Zaha Hadid Architects, Nikolaus Hirsch / Michel Müller, Goshka Macuga, Newbetter, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Cai Guo-Qiang, R&Sie, Neal Rock, SANAA (Kazuo Sejima+ Ryue Nishizawa), Barbara Vanderlinden and Igor Zabel.

Exhibition curated and designed by Shumon Basar, Joshua Bolchover and Parag Sharma [Newbetter]

The modern gallery setting remains an inspirational and problematic cultural battleground. Venerated shrine, shop window, subject matter or an anachronism awaiting a total revamp? It’s the backdrop to a fascinating love/hate tension played out across the art-world. And every so often love prevails and collaborative relationships are born.

Can Buildings Curate is the first exhibition to explore the role of the gallery setting in the practice of and relation between artists, architects and curators. It evokes a historical trajectory of ideological provocations, provocateurs and early twentieth-century visionaries pushing the boundaries between art and the dimensions of its display. This legacy continued through the 1960s and 70s when context became content, and ‘institutional critique’ came to the fore. Despite the dominance of the ‘white cube’ stage-set for contemporary art, imaginative alternatives are still being sought. The collected participants well aware of the non-neutral position of the gallery continue to provoke questions about the presentation and consumption of art.

A number of new works have been commissioned for the exhibition. Drabble + Sachs, a Swiss-based curator/ artist duo, will continue their research into the discourse of art’s economy by meeting with architect Isa Stürm and thrashing out the ménage à trois between art, architecture and curation as a live performance-debate. Dee Ferris, a London-based painter, will draw connections between the act of painting, her studio and the space of the exhibition. Neal Rock, also London-based, will tame his grotesquely beautiful silicon splatter-sculptures into colonising neglected areas of the gallery. Curator Mathieu Copeland will work with artist David Cunningham in allowing non-gallery spaces to ‘curate’ their intervention. The Lausanne-based architectural office, Décosterd + Rahm, will present their latest built work, the Lucy Mackintosh Gallery: a building that epitomises their fascination with the physiological effects of the ‘invisible’ dimensions of space, distorting temperature and humidity. can buildings curate will be Décosterd + Rahm’s first appearance in the UK.

A collection of ‘Indicative Projects’, built and unbuilt, stir up further themes. OMA/Rem Koolhaas, Diller+Scofidio, SANAA (Sejima/ Nishizawa), RßSie, AS-IF, Hirsch/Müller and Zaha Hadid represent some of the most inventive architectural practices working today, and they all collaborate with artists, curators or art institutions in unorthodox ways. Michael Asher has been creating conceptual, site-specific installation work that spans five decades, Davide Bertocchi and Goshka Macuga are fuelled by twentieth-century Utopian architectures and visionary display makers. Cerith Wyn Evans and Cai Guo-Qiang escape the curatorial limits of the gallery altogether and forge new life in half-forgotten structures. And curators Barbara Vanderlinden (Roomade, Brussels) and Igor Zabel (Moderna Galeria, Ljubjana) reflect on the logic of given architectural spaces in their curatorial practices.

A mobile exhibition design dedicated to the memory of a ‘white cube’ gone wrong holds Can Buildings Create together. For the show, it dissolves into display elements, such as walls, floors and plinths. Fabricated lightweight, secondary construction items culled from the unconscious of modern galleries and minimalist art, the ‘miscreant cube’ tampers with the AA gallery by colonising its idiosyncrasies.

Can Buildings Curate is curated and designed by Newbetter, who are: AA tutor, writer and critic Shumon Basar, architect/curator Joshua Bolchover and architect Parag Sharma.
For more information, visit http://newbetter.co.uk

Image: Diller+Scofidio, Mural, Whitney, NY (2003)

Private View
28 April 2005
AA Gallery 6.30 - 8.30pm
7.15pm Talk by architect Philippe Rahm (Decosterd & Rahm) in Lecture Hall (www.low-architecture.com)

Special Debate
29 April 2005
AA Lecture Hall 7.00pm
Drabble + Sachs + Isa Stuerm discuss the love/hate triangle of art, architecture and curation (http://www.drabblesachs.org)

Panel Discussion
3 May 2005
AA Lecture Hall 7.00pm
Jens Hoffman (Director of Exhibitions, ICA), Davide Bertocchi (artist, Milan/Paris) and AS-IF Architects (Berlin/Vienna) question Can Buildings Curate. Chaired by writer and AA tutor Shumon Basar.

Architectural Association School of Architecture
36 Bedford Square
London WC1B 3ES
Opening Times Monday To Friday 10.00–7.00 Saturday 10.00–3.00

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