Reconstructions

About The Exhibition

This exhibition poses a series of enquiries into our perception and experience of the built environment. It also explores the nature of photography and how the medium can be used to articulate some of the more imaginative or unsettling qualities of architecture. In Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs series ‘Building Berlin’, the artists installed simple temporary wooden structures in front of existing buildings. When photographed from a particular angle, the structures mimic the lines of the building, sometimes extending the lines and thus proposing new possibilities for the space. The temporary interventions disrupt the illusion of three dimensional space in the two-dimensional image, and play on the nature of photography as a construction.

Espen Dietrichson’s meticulously crafted, photographic collages were made following a series of extensive walks around major world cities and photographing the exteriors of buildings. He has then re-presented these buildings as opened up or ‘exploded’ forms. The fragments of the exterior are suspended in the air and they take on an uncanny and alien presence in an otherwise familiar cityscape.

Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani have been working in collaboration since 1993 on film and photography projects that often involve abandoned utopian architectural schemes. They made the series ‘XOO EX OVO OMNIA’ in 2005 in the old head quarter of the Parti Communiste Francais in Paris, which was designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in 1965 and completed in 1980. Like Onorato and Krebs, they staged a series of interventions within the existing space which they then photographed. By introducing actors into the building, and playing on the futuristic forms of the structure, the artists have created new narratives in this politically fraught space.

Jan McCullough has made a photographic survey of a house in Northern Ireland. In her series of small intimate prints she has observed the attempts made to repair and restore the building and the traces of human activity within the house. The title of the work is ‘Portrait as a Building’ which invites the viewer to make a comparison between the building and a person’s internal state.