The Architecture of Desire: Parts I & II
The I.D.E.A Space
September 2 – December 12, 2008
Featuring site-specific installations by contemporary artists Cristina Iglesias, Lida Abdul, and Runa Islam, The Architecture of Desire is a two-part exhibition that takes as its focal point the idea that a building, by its very nature, engenders a type of social order. By allowing or prohibiting certain movements or actions, restricting or admitting access, restraining or encouraging crowds, a building’s structure physically imposes an operating philosophy upon its inhabitants, creating a type of spatial culture.
While diverse in their approaches, the featured artists all commonly employ installation and time-based media (film, video, and performance) as expressive modes. The use of these media integrates the exhibition’s intellectual content with its presentation. Like architecture, an installation requires the viewer’s physical presence to activate its intellectual and physical space. By mirroring the spatial experience imposed by a building, installation art offers a particularly responsive medium to consider and critique the built environment’s operative mechanisms. Time-based media likewise create visual narrative “structures” through which a viewer must navigate.
September 5 – October 22, 2008
The Architecture of Desire:
Cristina Iglesias & Runa Islam
Drawing from a variety of inspirations and materials, Spanish sculptor Cristina Iglesias creates architectonic spaces that mediate between industrial and organic environments. Structural influences include the perforated intaglio walls of a Moorish building, the camouflage proscenium of a surveillance hut, the enveloping canopy of a dense forest, or the contemplative protection of a medieval cloister. Iglesias’ installation for The Architecture of Desire will test the boundaries between industrial culture, the human body, and the natural world. Runa Islam creates film installations that simultaneously employ and deconstruct the languages and techniques of narrative filmmaking. Islam often uses architectural structure to reframe physical and narrative space; the length of a shot corresponds to the depth of a room or the height of a wall or constructed spaces may reflect the psychological spaces between characters.
Runa Islam, Scale 1/16 inch = 1 foot, 2003
DVD,
Two screen projection
Photo: Gerry Johansson
For The Architecture of Desire, the I.D.E.A. Space will mount a site-specific presentation of Islam’s Scale (1/16 Inch = 1 foot). Shot in 35mm and presented in a dual-screen format, this filmic installation employs techniques of architectural mirroring to blur the boundaries between a synthetic reality and a lived experience, one that is grounded in place and time.
November 3 – December 12, 2008
The Architecture of Desire: Lida Abdul
Lida Abdul
Forced to leave Afghanistan as a child, Lida Abdul’s artworks address the ramifications of exile, war, and oppression. Her compelling images of bombed and ruined buildings jar loose a Western audience’s notions of home as safe haven and monumental architecture as enduring. Abdul challenges conventional thinking about architecture by forcing the viewer to confront the destroyed building not as a ruin or as empty space, but as an expression of architecture of absence.
Architecture of Desire exhibits and lectures generously sponsored by:
The Robert & Ruby Priddy Charitable Trust
The National Endowment for the Arts
The Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation
The Bee Vradenburg Foundation
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