THE RECESS 005
VENICE SPECIAL: Biennale preview / 2025 GB Pavilion Team announced / Historic graffiti mapped. ALSO: Dropcity Milano / Ron's Place / Albert Frey's Aluminaire House / Haworth Tompkins at De La Warr
14 April 2024
Welcome to the 5th edition of The Recess, bringing you news, updates & reports from the overlap of arts & architectures. This edition is dominated by a preview of Venice Biennale of Art, from where recessed.space will be reporting, but we also find time to bring news & updates away from the lagoon.
Venice Biennale Preview
All this week recessed.space will be at Venice Biennale of Art. Just as we did two years ago and then again last year for the Architecture edition, we will be reporting back with our highlights. For live action updates follow us on Instagram HERE for story updates, while over the summer months we will be writing more deeply from the pick of everything we discovered. So, read on to see what we are looking forward to most!
THE PAVILIONS
Ireland: A collaborative project led by Eimear Walshe which uses opera, earth building & choreography to explore the nation’s housing crisis. A film work will depict a frenzied building project using a labour-intensive 11,000 year old architectural process rooted in the country’s soil.
Brazil: Winner of the Golden Lion for the 2023 Architecture Biennale, Brazil are continuing their celebration & support for indigenous people, craft & culture this year. It is changing its name to The Hãhãwpuá Pavilion and will be presenting Ka’a Pûera: we are walking birds, working with the Tupinambá people who had thought to have gone extinct but are fighting to recover their territory lost to colonisation.
South Korea: Koo Jeong A presents Odorama Cities, a spatial exploration of public spaces & urbanity through the sense of smell. Having asked people “What is your scent memory of Korea?” the project seeks to build an olfactory portrait of the nation.
Bulgaria: With an installation of found objects, video & sound Krasimira Butseva, Lilia Topouzova & Julian Chehirian explore stories from individuals who experienced forced labour camps & prisons through the nation’s Communist period. Developed alongside historians & academics, trauma & memory is considered as an act of resistance.
Finland: Into one of the smallest national pavilions, architectural designer Kaisa Sööt with artists Pia Lindman, Vidha Saumya & Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen squeeze an interdisciplinary installation of art, life & activism. Poetry, performance, embroidery, drawing & sculpture will all be activated through Sööt’s “access architecture.”
Croatia: Back in the early days of recessed.space we wrote about Vlatka Horvat’s exhibition at PEER gallery in London (see 00013). Horvat was subsequently awarded the Croatian Pavilion and for Biennale presents by the means at hand which will include countless works that artist friends have posted and given to her by hand as a celebration of exchange and informal networks.
Netherlands: Artist Renzo Martens has worked with the Congo-based collective Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise, who have been working to free, regenerate & reforest the plantation of Lusanga. The installation will use materials & earth from the forest as a statement of reclaiming stolen lands & nurturing them into an equitable future.
Lithuania: A nation regularly presents excellent works at Venice in the relative few years since independence – and which won the Golden Lion in 2019 for the opera Sun & Sea (see recessed.space 00036) – Lithuania is showing a huge installation of glass & aluminium sculptures by Pakui Hardware. With an installation created with Isora x Lozuraityte Studio for Architecture, the new works will be set against figurative paintings by the late Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė in a study of crises across landscape, disease, industry & nature.
Singapore: Continuing a theme, Robert Zhao Renhui, who studied photography in London, continues his exploration into nature with Seeing Forest, a study of secondary forests which have been regrown from deforested lands. By looking at invasive species brought to Singapore over its colonialised history, Renhui considers a future of coexistence between humans & non-humans.
AROUND VENICE
The Fondazione Querini Stampalia is hosting a Tribute to Ilya Kabakov who died in 2023. His wife and partner in architecture and art, Emilia Kabakov, will be reconstructing four of their legendary installations within the Palazzo.
At the architecturally sublime Palazzo Grimani Gagosian artist Rick Lowe is mounting a body of work considering the arch in architecture with paintings related to mapping, urban movement & spatial shift.
Gayle Chong Kwan, who we featured recently on recessed.space (see 00167) is one of the artists included in Ulysses: We are all Heroes, at The Intimate Museum, Palazzo Bonvicini. Alongside Stephanie Blake, Isao & Didier Guillon, Homer’s poem, water & myth will be picked up by the four artists.
At Palazzo Diedo, Berggruen Arts & Culture present Janus, a group show of new commissions from artists including Urs Fischer, Carsten Höller, Sterling Ruby & Jim Shaw. Each exhibitor has created work to respond to the 18th century building designed by Andrea Tirali, once home to one of Venice’s most powerful families before becoming a primary school then a court.
In the Giardini, Sol Colero has been invited to create a colourful outdoor pavilion. Colero has designed such architecture at various sites across the world, including on the beach of Folkestone for the town’s 2017 Triennale
This year’s big-hit show at the Pinault Collection’s Palazzo Grassi presents the architectural abstract studies by Julie Mehretu. With works from 25 years of the artist’s exploration of architecture & space, Mehretu’s work will be interspersed with pieces by artists & writers who have influenced her practice, including Tacita Dean, David Hammons & Nairy Baghramian.
At TBA-21’s cavernous former church Ocean Space, Latai Taumoepeau & Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta present new site-specific commissions. Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania celebrates artists & communities who live across the Pacific Islands, one of the most affected parts of the world impacted by climate change.
The architectural explosion that was Big Biba
Over ten years Barbara Hulanicki’s fashion brand Biba grew from a mail order catalogue to a seven-floor department store like the world had never seen, with architecture from Disneyland, a giant dog selling tins of food & all the celebrities of swinging seventies London. Then it all suddenly ended. Through an exhibition at the Fashion & Textile Museum & book from ACC Art Press Will Jennings dives into the extraordinary design world of Big Biba.
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
In bloom: Konstantin Zhukov‘s intimate & ephemeral Black Carnation
The gay cruising scene of Soviet Riga was not only transposed into a small London gallery, but also onto an ephemeral material used for the train tickets gay men used to reach sites of encounter. Will Ferreira Dyke visited Neven gallery to discover Konstantin Zhukov’s presentation Black Carnation Part Three, his first exhibition in the UK and one continuing the artist’s exploration of Latvia’s LGBTQ+ history.
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
Models for a new society: Enzo Mari at the Design Museum
A new exhibition at London’s Design Museum presents over 300 designs & drawings from the life of Enzo Mari, a communist Italian designer who infused all he created with inventiveness, intelligence, politics & wit. The exhibition co-curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist & Francesca Giacomelli richly explores the designer’s life and work across graphics, furniture, toys & everything between.
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
Nicole Wermers’ Day Care: disrupting smoothness at The Common Guild
At The Common Guild’s temporary space in a Glasgow office block, German artist Nicole Wermers presents a series of sculptures of women’s bodies at work & rest. Set within the shiny, polished office space with a backdrop of Glasgow’s urban roofscape, Jonathan McAloon considers whether the works disrupt & interrogate, or add to the seamless smooth continuum of modern life.
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
Dropcity – a new architecture hub for Milano
A new centre for architecture has opened in Milan to with a series of talks and events starting from this week – but it is still a building site! Dropcity is being auto-constructed in real time through a hybrid blend of 3D printing and collaborative building. It will grow to become Milan’s hub of architecture & dialogue around creating a better world for the city’s 12,000 architects. Find out about Dropcity and the opening series of talks, events & concerts.
🔷 DISCOVER HERE 🔷
40,000 graffiti instances discovered in Venezia
Back in Venice, a project mapping historic graffiti across the city has reached 40,000 individual marks having only mapped 20% of the city. As reported on Medievalists.net, the research team use cameras, tablets & scanners to deeply discover the people’s history & how Venetians left their mark.
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
A unique outsider art Birkenhead house is listed
As reported by the Twentieth Century Society, Ron’s Place has been Grade II listed. Between 1986 and 2019 Ron Gittens turned his Victorian semi into a fantastical pleasure palace with a roaring lion fireplace, murals over every wall & playful references to antiquity throughout.
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
Venice AGAIN as the 2025 British Pavilion team is announced
The winning team for the GB presentation at next year’s Venice Biennale of Architecture has been announced. It’s made up of: Owen Hopkins, Director of Newcastle’s Farrell Centre; Dr Kathryn Yusoff, Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University; Kabage Karanja & Stella Mutegi, Co-founders & Directors of Cave_bureau from Nairobi, Kenya. Professor Aseem Inan of the Selection Committee said that “The proposal recognises that architecture has been complicit in inequality and environmental degradation, but that it also offers opportunities for repair, restitution, and renewal.”
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
Haworth Tompkins to repair & revamp the De La Warr Pavilion
Architects Journal report that architects Haworth Tompkins are to lead a team including JCLA Landscape Architects and theatre specialist CharcoalBlue on a refurb of the Eric Mendelsohn & Serge Chermayeff-designed De La Warr Pavilion. Work will improve the galleries - as used recently for the recessed.space covered Hélio Oiticica exhibition (see 00141) - revamp the auditorium & accessibility, increase technical facilities & remodel staff areas.
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
Albert Frey’s Aluminaire House reconstructed in Palm Springs
As reported in Dezeen, an important 1930s modernist house designed by Albert Frey has been plucked out of New York storage and reassembled at Palm Springs Art Museum where it glows in the Californian sun.
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
A report on new British film studio architecture
The RIBA Journal have published an interesting look at new film production facilities & the very specific – and LARGE – architecture needed to make movies. Written by Josephine Smit, the piece speaks to architects & users of the spaces which have huge acoustic & lighting requirements.
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
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From Birkenhead to Pompeii
The news of Birkenhead’s Ron’s Place with its marvelous outsider art frescoes filling domestic Birkenhead Victorian house reminded of when recessed.space reported from a Bologna exhibition of Pompei’s wall paintings in November 2022. Designs of exquisite detail revealed lives & deaths in Pompeii in a rich presentation of architectural surface & exploration of the daily life in the city.
🔷 READ HERE 🔷