Out of order
On the nature of materials
Exhibition opening and book release
Kah Bee Chow (MY/NZ), Maria Gondek (DK), Valérie Collart (FR).
Nina Wöhlk – exhibition curator
Initiated by Architecture Sans Frontières – Denmark
Opening Friday 7. February @ 5 – 9 pm
Leth & Gori, Absalonsgade 21B, 1658 Copenhagen V.
7. February - 9. March 2014
Primary building materials form the houses in which we live; creating an external structure and an internal shell. Its divided rooms makes the border between one apartment and another, and is the element that for most of us covers our daily surroundings, carrying different connotations depending on where in the world you are and whom you ask. From these materials, new structures have been formed and placed in new contexts. What is an obvious use for the architect is not a given for the artist. The knowledge of difference in peoples’ references to a material lies with the culture and the individual. This exhibition portrays some of those frames of references.
Out of order – On the nature of materials is an exhibition that draws together work from artists Kah Bee Chow, Maria Gondek and Valérie Collart. Emerging from five development projects in Sierra Leone, initiated and collected in the publication “Development Architecture – Learning from Sierra Leone” by Architecture Sans Frontières – Denmark, the artists have been given materials such as written journals and notes, video, photography, sketches and physical building materials to interpret and work within their own idiom.
Kah Bee Chow presents Chubby Physique, an arrangement of two-dimensional planes with supports. She observes that in crisis situations, the idea of shelter is often reduced to a two dimensional plane: a piece of board, a police riot shield, a thin sheet of armour with which to draw a line and protect the body. Her recent work looks at how these improvised shields read with display systems, modernist glass architecture and surveillance activity.
With Wall Maria Gondek has merged the heavy solid bricks with the velvet texture of a carpet. The pattern is formed by white, grey and red bricks and depicts an old weave, as traditionally done by men in certain tribes in Sierra Leone. Tricking the eye, the burned clay bricks drop to the floor in a long, soft and heavy collapse.
Site-specificity is the subject and her spatial installations convey tangible encounters that poetically manifest themselves as self-referential implications in the given setting. Rethinking the functionality of everyday material, her work seems to boarder between clever modifications and practical solutions.
Valérie Collart has worked with classical rough bricks and the fine shape of the antique amphorae. The simple nature of the bricks is contradicted and arranged to form not a solid element of a building but an ornamental object – the amphorae vase. The function of the brick is transformed into an aesthetically pleasing object on a pedestal. In Valéries sculptures, the idea is to sustain the stability and solidity whilst simultaneously wanting the objects to reveal their fragility and their precariousness.
The exhibition is kindly supported by Statens Kunstfond, KAB Fonden, Crowdfunding & Vesterbro Lokal Udvalg.
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