Tacita Dean, The Russian Ending, 2001
Courtesy The Western Bridge, collection of William and Ruth True
Architecture & Disaster
Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Tacita Dean,
Adriana Kuiper, and Geoffrey Pyke’s H.M.S. Habbakuk
September 8 - October 14, 2006
Opening Thursday, September 7 at 8pm
Artist Talk with Adriana Kuiper and Sabine Bitter: Saturday, September 9 at 3pm
This exhibition and artists’ talks are held in conjunction with Swarm7, Vancouver’s Annual Festival of Artist-run Culture.
Group exhibition exploring relationships between architecture and disaster.
The
Western Front Society is very pleased to announce a group exhibition
titled Architecture & Disaster. Works in this exhibition explore
invention and failure, the fetishization of fear and disaster through
the built environment, and tragedy and catharsis.
The
works in this exhibition touch in turn on invention and failure, the
fetishization of fear and disaster through the built environment, and
tragedy and catharsis. In a work entitled The Russian Ending,
Tacita Dean creates fictional endings to historical photographs.
Written over the images are their potential finales – possible
tragedies, failures and disasters. Her endings make reference to the
early days of film screening in Russia: it is said that Russian
audiences only enjoyed tragedy forcing studios to craft new, sad
conclusions for each of their films. As the photographs in The Russian Ending
suggest, much of Dean’s work is centered on the relic, which through
the shift in time and the loss of an original signifying context,
becomes a metaphor for dislocation.1
Adriana
Kuiper takes DIY plans from contemporary underground storm shelters as
a starting point for her work. The shelters, reminiscent of those built
in the 1950s and 1960s to shield from potential nuclear disaster, are
also marketed as a safe haven from terrorism. Constructed to protect
from the unknown, the shelters that Kuiper references become
underground monuments for a hollow promise of safety. In a poetic
response to the idea of bunkers as devices for protection and hiding,
Kuiper reconfigures the shelter plans into kites – objects evocative of
lightness, freedom, and play. Bunkers, in a sense, are emblematic of
fantasy and desire (they are built in reaction to imagined rather than
actual disasters) and more often than not remain unused becoming time
capsules of a time characterized by fear and trepidation.
A
decade earlier, in 1942 near the end of the Second World War, a British
inventor Geoffrey Pyke, presented the British military’s Chief of
Combined Operations with an invention. In a gesture similar to bomb and
fall-out shelters that Kuiper references, Pyke proposed another kind of
architecture built in reaction to potential war and disaster: a
floating island made of ice. Pyke intended to use the island as an
airfield that could be built larger than conventional aircraft carriers
at that time, enabling it to hold fighting planes like spitfires and
possibly even larger bombers. What made Pyke’s ice island
so unconventional was its strength – he found that by mixing sawdust
with water and freezing it you could create a material (pykrete) that
was remarkably strong, thawed at a very low rate, and could be
easily repaired. The project was abandoned after the first prototype
was built in Patricia Lake, near Jasper, Alberta. The H.M.S Habbakuk, as it was named, took nearly a year to thaw.
Accompanying
the exhibition is a print edition on the theme of architecture and
disaster by Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber. This edition, which
includes a text by Clint Burnham, is commissioned by the Western Front
Exhibitions Program as part of its ongoing series of artist projects in
print.
1. Clarrie Wallis, introduction to Tacita Dean: recent films and other works (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2001),
The
Western Front gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council
for the Arts, the BC Arts Council through the Government of British
Columbia, the City of Vancouver, and our members and volunteers. The
Western Front is a member of the Pacific Association of Artist-Run
Centres (PAARC).
Western Front Exhibitions
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