Architectural Fictions SHP Arts Centre Bracknell September 2010
Fiona Crisp Bernice Donszelmann Andreas Koch Uta Kögelsberger Mary Maclean Tim Renshaw Abigail Reynolds
Architectural Fictions brings together the work of eight artists who take a range of approaches to suggest the idea of fiction or narrative in relation to the built environment. The exhibition examines the idea that to give concentrated attention to the spaces of architecture is to move immediately beyond any simple notion of factual perceptual ‘presence’. That is, to give attention to the spaces of architecture is also to begin a passage into narrative, however explicit, oblique or barely speakable. In fact the tension between what is perceived and what is represented is, in the context of this exhibition, treated as a dimension of architecture itself and one that animates the various other qualities present in an individual work. From the generic codes of institutional space to the vertiginous vision of eccentric embodiments of perception, the exhibition draws on the interplay between the representational and the non-representational and asks how materials ‘think’ about architecture. The artists examine the narrative structures suggested by the ambiguities embedded in the built environment, proposing that architectural space offers points of fracture between a projected vision of articulated design and the uses and redundancies inherent in the processes of habitation. How and what fiction means in the context of art and architecture is the question that the exhibition evolves.