21 Nov 2008

Curating Architecture at The Showroom

Curating Architecture:

AMO/Rem Koolhaas & Reinier de Graaf
Ângela Ferreira
Nikolaus Hirsch & Philipp Misselwitz
Walid Raad
with response by Celine Condorelli

at The Showroom, London

20 November – 14 December 2008

Bringing together artistic and architectural projects by distinguished international practitioners, Curating Architecture focuses on the relationship between architecture as an increasingly influential (and dominantly transdisciplinary) aesthetic practice and the complex claims on public and institutional space made by artists, curators and architects as they seek to articulate new, often political and certainly critical, modes of approach.

Four new commissions represent contemporary artistic and architectural research that responds to the concerns of Curating Architecture:

AMO, the research wing of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture led by Rem Koolhaas, has consistently intervened into the process of exhibition-making in ways that provoke new thought on the relation between architecture and its exhibited manifestation as a political and persuasive form. For Curating Architecture AMO produces an installation that restages past exhibitions of the Office's projects in Brussels, Venice, Istanbul, and through the pages of their prolific publications in the context of current economic conditions.

Ângela Ferreira will present a work that responds to her research into utopian mobile architectural structures and their programmatic relation to politics. Starting points include: Jean-Luc Godard's documentation of his attempt to set up a democratically generated TV broadcasting service in Mozambique after the revolution of 1975; Jean Rouch's filmic experiments in Africa; the architecture of radio transmitters across revolutionary Mozambique; and Gustav Klutsis' mid-1920s portable agit-prop kiosks.

Nikolaus Hirsch & Philipp Misselwitz propose the literal reinvention of a kunsthalle which they will present in model form in the gallery, responding to the perceived necessity for divergent or aberrant patterns of spatial design in current museum and gallery models clearly evident in recent curatorial and artistic projects. The project is developed collaboratively as the architects invite artists (including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Raqs Media Collective and Anton Vidokle) to design modules of the building. As such they propose the architect as the ultimate curator, a provocative renegotiation of current role models.

Examining the relation between the wars of the past century in the Middle East and the current implementation of new cultural infrastructures in the UAE and elsewhere in the Arab world, Walid Raad is currently developing a suite of works under the title of Scratching on Things I Could Disavow that investigates how artworks are affected by various forms of violence. For Curating Architecture Raad will present A History of Modern and Contemporary Arab Art: Part I_Chapter 1: Beirut (1992-2005) Part I_Chapter 1_Section 79: Index XXVI: Artists.

The commissions form the final part of the Curating Architecture research project based at the Department of Art, Goldsmiths, University of London. The format of the exhibition is designed to reflect the research basis of an inquiry in which work is not produced to illustrate a concept but instead to test and further question assumptions about the relations between exhibition-making, architecture and artistic production as forms of social and political process. As such, the architect Celine Condorelli, will provide a set of questions aimed at the exhibition and its research format. These questions will be published alongside the exhibition.

The commissions will be installed sequentially so that the research will accumulate across the month of the exhibition.

Curating Architecture is a two-year research project funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and supported by the Department of Art, Goldsmiths, University of London. The exhibition is developed in collaboration with The Showroom. Sponsored by Colourlink.

Opening Events:
AMO: Thursday 20 November 5.30-7pm
Walid Raad and Ângela Ferreira: Tuesday 2 December 6.30-8pm
Nikolaus Hirsch & Philipp Misselwitz:Wednesday 10 December 6.30-8pm

Talks:
Reinier de Graaf and Andrea Phillips: 20 November 5.30pm
Angela Ferreira, Andrew Renton, Edgar Schmitz and Ros Grey: 2 December 6.30pm
Nikolaus Hirsch, Philipp Misselwitz, Andrea Phillips and Lisa Le Feuvre: Wednesday 10 December 6.30pm

Opening times:
Thursday-Sunday 12-6pm