THE RECESS 009
including: RA double-header with the Summer Exhibition & Schools graduate show / McAslan's new BM buildings / David Kohn x SMAK / Anya Gallaccio's AIDS memorial / Detroit's Little Village / & more
16 June 2024
recessed.space recently visited the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition to select some architectural highlights from the packed, eclectic show. You can find the link below, but the annual extravaganza coincides with a less well-known RA exhibition, the RA Schools show in which graduating students from the institution’s school show their craft. We feature that in this week’s newsletter main story.
Also, on top of links to all other recent recessed.space stories - from Jupiter Artland to Venice Biennale - we have our regular news round up from across the architecture/art overlap including a permanent new AIDS memorial from Anya Gallaccio, a forthcoming David Kohn Architects’ museum in Belgium, and John McAslan’s new British Museum buildings.
RA SCHOOLS SHOW 2024 OPEN ACROSS CHIPPERFIELD & HARRAP REFURBED SPACES
On the last newsletter we gave you a preview picture of the newly-completed David Chipperfield-designed Royal Academy School rejig. You can now go and see the building for yourself as it’s transformed from studios to galleries with the annual RA student show, open to the public until 30 June. 11 graduating artists present their work – and it’s an exciting mix of media and idea.
The exhibiting artists – Ilze Aulmane, Fungai Benhura, Kevin Brennan, Racheal Crowther, Fleur Dempsey, Jame St Findlay, Massimiliano Gottardi, Lizzie Munn, Fischer Mustin, Tanoa Sasraku and Norberto Spina – have only had their new spaces for a short amount of time, but within those weeks worked hard at completing their works before completely clearing their spaces and setting the space up for the show.
Chipperfield’s architecture isn’t showy. The only place the firm have deployed their trademark immaculately-polished concrete is where the new north-south corridor intersects with the RA School running perpendicular. There is also a timber lean-to the architects constructed for a space once occupied by service pipes and storage. There is attention to details throughout, however, and the neatness of shadow gaps, careful joints, and introduction of modern structural elements all show the typical Chipperfield touches. Arguably, in such an historic place, the work of Julian Harrap Architects is more present throughout, not least in the wonderful life drawing room.
The RA student show is a great opportunity to not only explore these restored and reimagined spaces, but to do so with a playful exploration of diverse artistic propositions. From conceptual innards of a Kenco coffee machine, large architectural constructions, and all-encompassing mixed-media installations, through to abstract minimalist painting and uncanny, unsettling video works, there is a genuine mix on show.
With recent RA Schools graduates including Michael Armitage, Eddie Peake, Kira Freije (see 00098) and Olu Ogunnaike (see 00015) it’s also an opportunity to spot who you think may be showing in the main RA galleries upstairs at some later date.
Grace Jones in Stockport: Dave Haslam’s DJ-infused writing on unexpected cultural histories
International DJ Dave Haslam has penned a short book centred on an unexpected visit of disco goddess Grace Jones to the town of Stockport in northern England. In telling the story of how this brief event came to be, Haslam explores interweaving anecdotes & narratives across cultural & spatial history, with a writing style honed in his DJing approach from the Hacienda & clubs worldwide. Illustrated with photographs by Paul Dobraszczyk.
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
Art & music combine in The Vinyl Factory’s immersive soundscape
In the huge basement of 180 Studios off the Strand, London, The Vinyl Factory have created an immersive exhibition of art & music. With a series of large-scale installations & presentations from leading artists & designers, the exhibition also creates a site for performances & dialogue over the summer months.
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
Venice Biennale: Osman Yousefzada’s Palazzo for Immigrants
In a collaboration with the V&A Museum & Fondazione Berengo, British-Pakistani artist & writer Osman Yousefzeda has created a unique exhibition, the Palazzo for Immigrants. With humour & gravitas, the artist draws idea & reference from his own life as well as that from the experiences of immigrants the world over, as explored by Hadeel Eltayeb.
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
Jupiter Artland: a Scottish landscape packed with uncanny, playful & enormous art
Jupiter Artland is a Scottish manor house surrounded by woods, meadows & lakes, all full of unexpected & spectacular site-specific art. A short trip outside of Edinburgh, 35 permanent works in a growing collection of internationally celebrated artists give energy to one of Britain’s most unusual sculpture parks.
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
Our architectural highlights from the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition
The annual Summer Exhibition at London’s Royal Academy, now in its 256th year, is a lot. With 1,710 works on show there’s a real mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. We put in the leg work for you to find a few of the show’s highlights that present & play on architecture or the built environment, across photography, film, cross-stitch, collage & paint.
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
David Kohn to create large new extension to Ghent’s SMAK museum
The excellent SMAK museum of art in Ghent, Belgium - or, in its longer name the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, which owns a collection of over 2,000 works showing alongside global contemporary artists - has appointed David Kohn Architects as designers of a new 20,000m2 space.
The Architects’ Journal reports that DKA will repurpose the a monumental glass and steel hall built for the 1913 World Fair, which is connected to the main museum and will act as a vast entrance pavilion and display area. The architects say they will take a circular approach to materials in what is a deep retrofit of the existing shell with a scheme which will also see the surrounding 19th century park revamped.
🔷 READ IN THE ARCHITECTS’ JOURNAL HERE 🔷
Anya Gallaccio commissioned for AIDs memorial
The charity AIDS Memory UK has announced Anya Gallaccio as the chosen artist to design a permanent AIDs memorial on Store Street, London, close to the former Middlesex Hospital which was home to the first AIDS ward), James Pringle House which saw some of the first UK AIDS patients, and the Bloomsbury Clinic which is the busiest HIV clinic in the country.
Treatment and preventative medicine for HIV has meant the disease is far less dangerous than it once was, but it still disproportionately impacts gay and bisexual men, Black African communities, people with bleeding disorders, and injecting drug users. Gallaccio’s sculpture, appearing like a tree trunk with central rings extracted, is designed to raise awareness of those affected as well as offer a space of memory for those lost.
The commission, as reported below in Artlyst, comes ahead of a major retrospective of Gallaccio’s work at Turner Contemporary from September.🔷 READ ON ARTLYST HERE🔷
Detroit’s Little Village arts campus is now not so little
As reported in The Art Newspaper, a complex of several Detroit buildings has opened as Little Village, a campus of cultural spaces including a church turned into a gallery, a Tony Hawk-designed skatepark,
The 1912 former Catholic church at the centre is at the heart. Transformed by architects Peterson Rich Office, it now offers a space for exhibition and events. Nearby, OMA have turned an early-1900s bakery and warehouse into an HQ for local arts charities Signal Return and Progressive Art Studio Collective. Around the site, a landscape designed by Office of Strategy + Design stitches it all together.
Read more about the project and its approach to art and architecture in The Art Newspaper:
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
British Museum’s storage and research centre is now in operation
Also in The Art Newspaper, Gareth Harris reports on the new £64m John McAslan + Partners-designed British Museum storage and research facility in Berkshire. A site encompassing more than 15,000m2, it will store over 1.3 million objects in perfect conditions and is constructed in partnership with the University of Reading.
Only 1% of the Museum’s collection of over 8 million items are on display at the British Museum at any one time, and so the centre is designed to increase accessibility for public and scholars to the wider collection.
🔷 READ IN THE ART NEWSPAPER HERE 🔷
Israel withdraw from Venice 2025
The ongoing violent attacks on Palestine and its citizens, which hugely increased since the murderous terrorist attacks by Hamas on October 7, continues to impact Israel’s cultural representation on the world stage. Still in the fallout from Eurovision’s chaos and protests, it has been announced that the country will not take part in the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture.
While Israel’s culture ministry have stated it is due to planned renovations on the Zeev Rechter-designed national pavilion, it is widely considered that it is to avoid similar protests and bad headlines as incurred this year after artist Ruth Patir locked her work inside the Pavilion and stated it would not be open to the public until “a cease-fire and hostage release agreement is reached.”
🔷 READ MORE IN DEZEEN 🔷
Over its first two years, recessed.space has published 203 articles from across the world on the best of thinking from where art & architecture overlap. If you enjoy recessed.space, please consider donating to support new writing.
Assemble’s 2022 games in Nottingham
The two architecture rooms in this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition were curated by Turner Prize winning collective Assemble. Olly Wainwright described their contribution as “a wonderfully diverse assemblage of material experiments and novel techniques that revel in the tactile, crafted qualities of architecture”, in his Guardian review (read here).
Back in June 2022, Ruby Allison visited Nottingham Contemporary to see another Assemble curation for The Place We Imagine, a joyful project channelling Lina Bo Bardi’s ideas of play and spaces for children.