Press release

ARCHIT-ACTION !

Emil Filla Gallery Ústí nad Labem

September 15 - October 21, 2006

Opening - September 14, 2006, 6 pm

With: AS-IF, Lina Bo-Bardi, Iris Dullin-Grund and Hans Wotin, 51N4E, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal,

Cedric Price, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, SANAA and Walter Niedermayr

A corner for one's memory? A tomb for famous mummies? A warehouse or an archive of human work, made by humans, timeworn and obsolete, and treated with a sense of compassion?
(Lina Bo-Bardi)


A city centre that is approachable for citizens of all social strata. A theatre, a concert hall, libraries - for children, for music enthusiasts...exhibition spaces and meeting places...a café made for reading,
a wine bar, a theatre café, club rooms for artistic and technical hobby societies?
(Iris Dullin-Grund)


A tool, a factory...an active building? A centre that constantly provides something new...a cross between the information-oriented, computerized Times Square and the British Museum?
(Piano & Rogers)


A University of the streets?
(Cedric Price)

On September 14th, 2006, the Emil Filla Gallery Ústí nad Labem will open at 6 p.m. the exhibition

ARCHIT-ACTION !, curated by Barbara Steiner and Oana Tanase. This exhibition takes a look at architectural

practices that strive or have striven in the past to establish a new and enabling relationship between art,

architecture and society, by focussing on the user or observer and inviting them to act. Past ideas should be

activated for current debates.

In the first half of the 20th century we find alternative approaches to art in various avant-garde movements, such in

the work of El Lissitzky or Frederik Kiesler. The deliberate empowering of visitors to the exhibition was coupled with

the hope that an emancipated and self-defining public might be the result. After the Second World War the

relationship between art, architecture and society developed differently in socialist and capitalist countries.

In the Sixties and Seventies, the plain white exhibition room became a focus of interest in architecture and critical

(visual) art in the Western Europe and the United States. Unconnected with history and the social environment, it

was designed to suggest, in the words of Hans Haacke, that "art floats above the ground and has nothing to do with

the historical situation in which it comes into being". Drastic social changes further exacerbated the conflict that

surrounded the idea of art as autonomous. Questions about representation and exclusion, hegemony and power,

were vehemently raised and discussed. This had an effect on the way, in which architecture was conceived: instead

of cutting itself off from the outside world, lingering in rooms consecrated specially to aesthetic aims, art was now to

be more closely linked to the daily circumstances of life and connected to the urban environment that surrounded it.

So buildings began to open themselves quite literally to the outside world, with glass panes and giant display

screens providing a link between the activities inside and outside the building, so that social and spatial boundaries

became fluid and porous. Examples are Cedric Price's Fun Palace, the Pompidou Center in Paris designed by Renzo

Piano and Richard Rogers, and Lina Bo-Bardi's Museu de Arte in Sao Paolo. Alternative spatial schemes, functional

pointers and presentation systems defined the locus of art and the possibilities of encounter in a new way. This was

linked with the hope of bringing about a radical change in the way in which art was produced and received, of

opening up to various interest groups - in short, of giving art a new kind of social effectiveness.

The demand for the social effectiveness was always strong in the socialist concept of art. Art was the expression of

and had to have a direct function for the socialist society. "Cultural palaces", cultural institutions for the working

class people, functioned as venue for visual art but also for political meetings, workshops, teaching, reading and

theatre circles. In the first decade of the late 40s and 50s the building type of the cultural palace was strongly

connected to Soviet architecture but modified by younger architects the 60s and 70s. At that time the cultural

palace found its way back from the factories and countryside to the cities, opened more to its urban environment

and extended its social functions. As a model we can find here the Haus der Kultur und Bildung by Iris Dullin-Grund

in Neubrandenburg. Programmatically the concept of the cultural house mixes works by professionals and non-

professionals. Cultural production and perception should have been accessible to anyone.

Ideas current at the time found an added relevance in some aspects of contemporary architecture. The knowledge

that architecture is never a neutral background to the objects exhibited, but rather organises the gaze of the viewer

and prescribes distinct modes of reading and interpretation, makes the relationship between the perceiving subject,

the object on view and the architectural frame a critical issue. By contrast with the Sixties and Seventies, the social

framework (including all the political, economic, social and cultural implications) is taken into account here. If

changeability is spoken of, then it is a matter of playing options within quite definitely prescribed rules of play. In

this case, flexibility is deliberately restricted, so that the playing options selected and the associated changes,

should come into view all the more clearly within a prescribed set of parameters. The changeability of the internal

layout structure of the building not only relates to the geometry of spatial links, it also suggests a reformulation of

the function of the room in question. The rooms are no longer designed with a single definite function in view -

rather they imply the possibility of their own reinterpretation. Starting from the position that the function and

significance of architecture exist on the basis of a certain social agreement, an act of communication as a result of

which - and only as a result of which - a space can be endowed with significance at all, what we have here is spaces

that are provided for negotiation. The buildings seem to invite us to negotiate institutional parameters. Examples

are the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa by SANAA, the Groeningemuseum in Bruges and

the Lamot™-Centre in Mechelen by 51N4E, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Louvre in Lens and the Architecture

Foundation in London by Lacaton & Vassal.

The exhibition was also shown at the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (May 20 - August 13, 2006).

ARCHIT-ACTION ! is part of the project againstwithin and has been funded with support of the CULTURE 2000

programme of the European Union.

Under the title againstwithin 5 institutions co-operate: The Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig; the Faculty of

Art and Design, J. E. Purkyne University, Usti nad Labem; the Forum Stadtpark, Graz; the Van Abbe Museum,

Eindhoven; the Institute for Contemporary Art and Dunaujvaros.

ARCHIT-ACTION ! exhibition as a part of againstwithin project is kindly supported by:

CULTURE 2000 programme of the European Union

The Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic

The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic

City of Ústí nad Labem

Foundation for Contemporary Art Prague



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