Exhibitions >

Architecture and Disaster

Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber, Tacita Dean, Adriana Kuiper and Geoffrey Pyke
September 8 – October 14, 2006 | Opening: September 7, 2006 8PM
Curated by Candice Hopkins

The works in this exhibition touch in turn on invention and failure, the fetishization of fear and disaster through the built environment, and tragedy and catharsis. In a work entitled The Russian Ending Tacita Dean creates fictional endings to historical photographs. Written over the images are their potential finales—possible tragedies, failures and disasters. Her endings make reference to the early days of film screening in Russia: it is said that Russian audiences only enjoyed tragedy forcing studios to craft new, sad conclusions for each of their films. As the photographs in The Russian Ending suggest, much of Dean’s work is centered on the relic, which through the shift in time and the loss of an original signifying context, becomes a metaphor for dislocation.[1]

Adriana Kuiper takes DIY plans from contemporary underground storm shelters as a starting point for her work. The shelters, reminiscent of those built in the 1950s and 1960s to shield from potential nuclear disaster, are also marketed as a safe haven from terrorism. Constructed to protect from the unknown, the shelters that Kuiper references become underground monuments for a hollow promise of safety. In a poetic response to the idea of bunkers as devices for protection and hiding, Kuiper reconfigures the shelter plans into kites—objects evocative of lightness, freedom, and play. Bunkers, in a sense, are emblematic of fantasy and desire (they are built in reaction to imagined rather than actual disasters) and more often than not remain unused becoming time capsules of a time characterized by fear and trepidation.

A decade earlier, in 1942 near the end of the Second World War, a British inventor Geoffrey Pyke, presented the British military’s Chief of Combined Operations with an invention. In a gesture similar to bomb and fall-out shelters that Kuiper references, Pyke proposed another kind of architecture built in reaction to potential war and disaster: a floating island made of ice. Pyke intended to use the island as an airfield that could be built larger than conventional aircraft carriers at that time, enabling it to hold fighting planes like spitfires and possibly even larger bombers. What made Pyke’s ice island so unconventional was its strength—he found that by mixing sawdust with water and freezing it you coul create a material (pykrete) that was remarkably strong, thawed at a very low rate, and could be easily repaired. The project was abandoned after the first prototype was built in Patricia Lake, near Jasper, Alberta. The H.M.S Habbakuk, as it was named, took nearly a year to thaw.

Accompanying the exhibition is a print edition on the theme of architecture and disaster by Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber. This edition, which includes a text by Clint Burnham, is commissioned by the Western Front Exhibitions Program as part of its ongoing series of artist projects in print.

Notes

1. Clarrie Wallis, introduction to Tacita Dean: Recent Films and Other Works (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2001), 9.

artist biographies

Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber Vienna and Vancouver based artist Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber have collaborated since 1993 on projects addressing urban geographies, architectural representations and related visual politics. With Vancouver writer Jeff Derksen they formed the research collective Urban Subjects (US) in 2004. MORE >

Tacita Dean Tacita Dean trained as a painter and now works in a variety of media. She is best known for her compelling 16mm films, in which the specific qualities associated with film-making are of central importance. Dean’s films are haunted by architectural relics which seem to embody outmoded or bankrupt beliefs, but at their time of execution promised much. In their formal qualities, her films reference other art forms, painting especially. Dean also works with video, sound, drawings and objects. Her work occupies a place between fact and fiction. It is pervaded by a sense of elusiveness, a search for something that exists as much in the imagination as anywhere else. The largest solo exhibition of Tacita Dean’s work to date was at Schaulager in fall 2006. Tate modern has recently devoted a room to a display of her work held in the Tate collection. Oslo’s Museum of Art, Design and Architecture held a solo exhibition earlier this year in the spring. Dean’s work has been included in many group exhibitions both in Britain and abroad. A major monograph by the artist was published by Phaidon in 2006. Tacita Dean was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998. MORE >

Adriana Kuiper Adriana Kuiper hoalds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Western Ontario and is a graduate of the University of Guelph. She currently lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she teaches at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries across Canada including the touring exhibition, CAMPsites. Kuiper was recently announced as a semi-finalist for the 2006 Sobey Art Award. MORE >

Geoffrey Pyke Geoffrey Nathaniel Pyke (1893–1948) was a British scientist and inventor (in British 1940s slang, a ”boffin”) whose generally unorthodox ideas were often very difficult to implement. In lifestyle and appearance, he fit the common stereotype of a ”mad scientist”. He was a student at Cambridge University. During World War I, Pyke was held in the Ruhleben P.O.W. Camp in Germany. He wrote a memoir of his experiences there, entitled To Ruhleben – And Back. His most famous proposal was to build giant aircraft carriers from pykrete, a substance produced by freezing a mixture of water and wood pulp during World War II. This endeavour, known as Project Habakkuk, was investigated by Combined Operations and had the personal backing of Lord Louis Mountbatten and Sir Winston Churchill, but never reached completion. It was not as absurd as it sounded, as wood fibres and the crystalline ice formed a strong composite material, very resistant to damage by impact, so long as it was kept frozen—the ships would be virtually unsinkable, as discussed in detail in the articles on pykrete and Project Habakkuk. On a winter evening in 1948, Pyke shaved his beard and consumed a bottleful of sleeping pills; his landlady found his corpse the following morning. MORE >