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In 2000, the Serpentine Gallery in London initiated an annual commission for a temporary structure by an architect or design team who has not completed a building in England at the time of the Gallery’s invitation. Over the past eleven years, the Serpentine summer pavilion has become an internationally-known site for experimentation by some of the world’s foremost artists and architects. Above, the 2001 pavilion by Daniel Libeskind; below, the 2009 pavilion by Rem Koolhaas with Cecil Balmond from Arup.
Author: Shani K Parsons
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A decade+ of Serpentine summer pavilions
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The Power Plant Refresh inaugural exhibitions, review pt 3: To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong?
continued from The Power Plant Refresh inaugural exhibitions, review pt 2: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
…Upstairs in The Power Plant’s North Gallery, a more poetic and less overtly political mode of curatorial inquiry is represented, one which serves as a counterpoint to the ground floor exhibitions (see links to related posts below). To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong? is a group exhibition of young Canadian and American artists curated by Jon Davies, Assistant Curator at The Power Plant. Taking its title and cue from the poetry of American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, this show features fantastical landscapes from the imaginations of artists Andrea Carlson, Annie MacDonell, Kevin Schmidt, Jennifer Rose Sciarrino, and Erin Shirreff.
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The Power Plant Refresh inaugural exhibitions, review pt 2: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
continued from The Power Plant Refresh inaugural exhibitions, review pt 1: Thomas Hirschhorn
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Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s video projection and installation, Phantom Truck + Always After, occupy the second main floor space at The Power Plant. Diametrically opposed to the overwhelming visual stimulation of Das Auge (see previous post linked below), Manglano-Ovalle’s work is no less political and confrontational. Through understated, enigmatic sound, video, and installation work, Manglano-Ovalle explores the metaphorical potential of the concept of “climate” as it relates to both meteorological and socio-cultural and political events that characterize our time. For the relaunch, The Power Plant has chosen two key works from Manglano-Ovalle’s oeuvre which focus on the aftermath of destruction. Always After (The Glass House) is a wall-sized projection documenting the sweeping up of shattered glass after Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall, former home to the architecture school at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, was ceremoniously destroyed to make way for renovation in 2005. Extreme close-ups of cracked, crystalline forms being slowly pushed and mounded by the broom are a meditation on the necessity and ritual of restoring order after a destructive event. An atmospheric soundtrack comprising dischordant notes and rumbling sounds interspersed with long intervals of near-silence gives the projection an unsettling, threatening tone, as if a storm has just passed or is brewing. The obliteration of the work of a modernist icon represents a critical shift with resultant underlying instability in the socio-cultural climate of our time. -
The Power Plant Refresh inaugural exhibitions, review pt 1: Thomas Hirschhorn
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The three inaugural exhibitions for the newly “refreshed” Power Plant, Thomas Hirschhorn: Das Auge, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: Phantom Truck + Always After, and To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong? are telling indicators of the directions in which the current leadership would like to go. The proverbial gauntlet is thrown down with the exhibition centrepiece, Das Auge (The Eye), one of Thomas Hirschhorn’s most confrontational installations to date.
