Modern architecture works
Industrialna 11 gallery Opening 24 October 6pm.
vivacom arthall
fridge &haspel
House of cinema
25. — 10.
UACEG
october
november
Modern architecture works октомври october
25.
— 10.
ноември november
PROGRAM 24 October – 10 november Industrialna 11 gallery [Tue-Sun 3pm—7pm]
Curated by: Vera Mlechevska and Ina Mertens
Mircea Nikolae Romanian Kiosk Company, 55'
Opening 24 october / 6.30pm
30 October – 3 November Vivacom Arthall [Wed-Sun 10am—6pm]
25 October – 10 november Fridge&Haspel [Tue-Sun 3pm—7pm]
29 October / 6.30pm Opening of Andreas Fogarasi Kultur + Freizeit (Culture and Leisure)
25 October / 7pm Artist’s talk with Alexander Ugay Luchezar Boyadjiev [bg] Kateřina Držková [cz] Cyprien Gaillard [fr] Nicolas Grospierre [pl] Ronny Hardliz [ch] Pravdoliub Ivanov [bg] Barbora Klímová [cz] Daniel Kötter/Constanze Fischbeck [de] Andreas Fogarasi [at/hu] David Maljkovic [hr] Nicola Mihov [bg] Katrīna Neiburga [Lv] Uriel Orlow [uk/ch] Shirin Sabahi [se/ir] Maija Rudovska [lv] Rimas Sakalauskas [lt] Alexander Ugay [kz] Julita Wójcik [pl] HAPPSOC Actions – Zita Kostrová / Stano Filko / Alex Mlynárčik [sk] Heliopolis – Alex Mlynárčik / Ĺudovít Kupkovič / Viera Mecková [sk]
27 October The House of Cinema [2.30pm screening]
26 October The House of Cinema [2pm screening] Maija Rudovska and Shirin Sabahi, Expired monument, Story of a Culture Palace, 12' Presented by Maija Rudovska Katrīna Neiburga Press House, 27' Cyprien Gaillard Desniansky Raion, 30' Daniel Kötter Bühne, 18'
5 November Vivacom Arthall [2pm—6.45pm screening] Mircea Nikolae Romanian Kiosk Company, 55' Maija Rudovska and Shirin Sabahi, Expired monument, Story of a Culture Palace, 12' Presented by Maija Rudovska Katerina Neiburga Press House, 27' Cyprien Gaillard Desniansky Raion, 30' Daniel Kötter Bühne, 18'
22 – 26 October Workshop with Ronny Hardliz аt the University of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy. Art Works vs. Artworks A workshop building Frank Lloyd Wright’s dendriform test column of the Johnson Wax Headquarters. The artist and architect Ronny Hardliz will confront the problem of building Frank Lloyd Wright’s dendriform test column with contingent questions, like: What does it mean to build this column? Is it a rebuilding, a re-enactment, a sculpture, a monument, a statue, an exercise, research, a model, architecture, art? Should it be in the original material, or entirely in concrete, or in wood, or in another material? Can we simplify? Should we not think too much and just start building? Together with a civil engineer and the participants of the workshop such questions will be approached by doing. The first meeting will take place in the Frank Lloyd Bar at the University of Architecture Civil Engineering and Geodesy on 22 October 5pm. The workshop is open to the public.
In recent decades the modernist legacy in Eastern European countries has become an issue in many debates. With the new political system and new socio-cultural conditions after 1989, the status of many buildings constructed in the Communist era was either reconsidered in the conditions of commercial pragmatism or loaded with contradictory ideological freight. Many public buildings constructed in the 1960's, '70's and '80's are now abandoned, others have been transformed functionally or their capacity has shrunk, while some have been adapted to the new needs of society. Modern Architecture Works revisits the legacy of modern architecture in Eastern European countries with the necessary distance from the ideological concerns of its time. The vision of artists, photographers and film makers enables us to raise questions about modernism’s late incarnation during socialism, but also about the future of these buildings, about the transformation of ideas, and about the migration of visual patterns within different social and political circumstances. The artists’ interest in the topic was prompted by various aspects of modern architecture. Some of the participants take as a counterpoint the collapse of the ideas that gave rise to the architectural style of the period; others were interested in purely visual and aesthetic qualities; for a third group the guiding principle was the mixing, in architecture, of politics, culture and creative thinking. The project seeks to reconsider the social and architectural traits of modern architecture and to see it as a continuation of the ideas of early Modernism and a manifestation of it in an entirely different political regime. The subject is eventually traced up to the transformations in Eastern Europe in the years after 1989.
A reappraisal is offered of the architecture of Modernism and the social visions that accompany it. Modernist architecture is seen as a projection of an era which has come to us in material form and which could help us catalogue its pros and cons in this period, as well as its subordination to the political situation. The exhibition aims to overcome the purely political or binary assessment of public architecture. Its ambition is to look at architecture through its expediency, its architectural qualities and the manner in which the needs of contemporary society integrate or reject them. At the same time, it is necessary to take a modern-day look at some underappreciated buildings, as well as at others whose merits have been exaggerated. The exhibition features works by artists who were inspired by the architecture of the period from the 1960s through the 1980s. The exhibition includes documentaries, experimental films, photography, installations, archived materials and an art book.
The films selected include works by artists inspired by different architectural phenomena in different ways. Some use the architectural pattern as a narrative structure, while others explore with purely cinematic means, aware of the suggestive power of media. The camera here encounters objects, time or movement while letting our gaze slip over the buildings to make us distant observers of their social transformations.
Maija Rudovska / Shirin Sabahi Expired Monument, Story of a Culture Palace, 2011
Cyprien Gaillard Desniansky Raion DVD, 30 min. Soundtrack by Koudlam Copyright Cyprien Gaillard Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin London / Bugada & Cargnel, Paris /Laura Bartlett Gallery, London 2007
Alternating between order and chaos, the video "Desniansky Raion" explores the notion of entropy as developped by Land Art major artist Robert Smithson. After a static introduction shot on a building from the 1970s, a monumental triumphal arch marking the entrance of Belgrade, the video unwinds its three sequences, without visible narrative link, to the electrolyrical music of composer Koudlam: first a pitched battle between two hooligan gangs on a car park in the suburbs of Saint-Petersburg; then a grandiose show of lights, lasers and fireworks on the façcade of a housing block in the suburbs of Paris, before it collapses; finally, a precariousi flightover a multitude of grey towers rising into a snowy and melancholic landscape on the outskirts of Kiev, from which there where from eventually emerges a perfect circular organisation, recalling the megalithic site of Stonehenge, in England.
The video essay Expired Monument, Story of a Culture Palace is a poetical document of the most popular piece of Stalinist architecture in Riga – the VEF building or the Palace of Culture of the National Electrotechnical factory (Valsts elektrotehniskā fabrika). The building is also one of the most spectacular examples of the local architecture of 1950’s Latvia. The video essay reopens and updates the case of Soviet cultural heritage and its interpretations. It challenges the construction of memory in the context of present-day cultural environment but is also a kind of love letter to the architecture, especially the Soviet one (which is also the academic interest of one of the video’s authors). In an attempt to reflect on the topic from a different perspective, the work has been generated by adopting curatorial methodology. Expired Monument is an experimental project directed by the art historian and curator Maija Rudovska in close collaboration with the artist Shirin Sabahi and the operators from Tritone film studio Māris Zommers and Mārcis Ābele. The project was carried out as part of the postgraduate curatorial studies program CuratorLab at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm in 2010.
Katrīna Neiburga The Press House, 2009 Daniel Kötter Bühne, 2012, Frame-Analysis, Varna, november 28, 2011
Daniel Kötter’s most recent film Bühne examines a moment of fundamental change in the understanding of public space in post-communist Bulgaria. The Palace for Sports and Culture in the Bulgarian Black Sea coastal town of Varna was built as a prestige project of modernist architecture within the communist understanding of theatre and sport. While no changes have been made to the interior design since its opening in 1968, every week the main hall changes its architectural and social function. The film stages the “theatre” itself, not as yet another art form (with its specific institutional conditions, market rules and local aesthetic and historical limitations), but as a name for the allegoric space of encounter.
Design by POSTSTUDIO
Katerina Neiburga explores the history of Press House a building of media and publishing houses during Soviet times. It was built in Riga in 1978, the year the artist was born. Her very personal memories of the time spent in the building – the cafe filled with cigarette smoke, the huge elevators, seemingly infinite stairs and labyrinths of rooms – brought her back to the deserted building today. Her narrative is constructed around the stories of people who worked here – either happy about their pasts with the building or terrorized by censorship, they all spent significant parts of their lives here. The video takes the viewer on a journey. With a slow-moving camera we witness the long-abandoned spaces and encounter the people who once worked here. It is a multilayered story, telling us about the entanglement of human memories, the effects of concealing, but also about the capacity of an abandoned building to be a reservoir of sentiments.
Mircea Nicolae Romanian Kiosk Company, 2010
"With disarming, even deceptive simplicity Mircea Nicolae tells a complex multi-levelled tale of the coming together and coming apart of his family against the coming together and coming apart of socialism in Romania after the second world war. Using documentary film footage, snapshots, architectural photos, his mother's shoes as well as pictures and models of professional and vernacular kiosks of modernist design, he gives us moving as well as critical images and symbols of the interweaving of private life and history, the personal and political." Robert Storr, Future Generation Art Prize Jury 2010