Demented Architecture

Running from 27 June - 08 November 2015 at the City Gallery in Wellington, the Demented Architecture exhibition brings together work by contemporary artists that satirises the relationship between art and architecture, and the mythology of the architect.

City Gallery has a long history of presenting architecture exhibitions. However, there has never been an exhibition like Demented Architecture. This exhibition brings together works by contemporary artists that, for the most part, take on architecture and the architect mythology as a subject—often as a subject of parody. 

Art and architecture have always existed in a kind of mutually beneficial standoff,” says curator Aaron Lister, “Entirely dependent on each other, they are also in a constant state of one upmanship and battle for cultural supremacy. Artists despair when architects exhibit inside galleries, architects rise up when artists design buildings. ‘I blame the Greeks!’ says Vinko Glanz, just one of the architects who features as a character in this exhibition.”

Olafur Eliasson’s The Cubic Structural Evolution Project sits at the centre of this exhibition. Visitors are invited to start building with the thousands of pieces of gleaming white Lego scattered across a gleaming white table. In empowering his participants to ‘become’ architects and contribute to his work’s construction, destruction and reconstruction, Eliasson raises issues around the relationship between art and architecture that echo around the whole exhibition.  

Jasmina Cibic’s highly stylised videos that restage historical debates concerning art, architecture and power represented Slovenia at the 2013 Venice Biennale.  The opposite scenario is played out in Scottish artist Henry Coombes’s darkly mesmerising video I am the Architect, this is not Happening, this is Unacceptable. The video is set inside the attic and the confused mind of retired architect Clive who slowly surrenders the order and rationality of his profession to the impulsive and chaotic values of art. 

Wellington artist Kirsty Lillico’s soft sculptures similarly undermine the promise of modernist architecture. In cutting floor plans from iconic modernist buildings into pieces of carpet salvaged from local building sites, she renders the utopian visions of architects like Le Corbusier dirty, flaccid, and redundant. 

Demented Architecture
27 June – 8 November 2015
City Gallery Wellington
Free Entry | citygallery.org.nz