Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Reading : A - Art
‘No Haus Like Bau’, incorporating live performance, staged at the Berlin Biennale ‘No Haus Like Bau’ (2008) and two films ‘Better Future: Wolf Shaped’ (2008) and ‘The Future is Now’ (2009). Films subsequently screened at: Grey Area, Brighton; Wexford Arts Centre, Wexford; Highlanes Municipal Art Gallery (part of the Drogheda Arts Festival), Drogheda; Israeli Video Art and Experimental Award film screening, Jerusalem; Whitechapel Gallery, London; XYZ Collective and Capsule, Tokyo; Cartel Gallery, London; Oberhausen Film Festival, Oberhausen; Centre Can Felipa, Barcelona.
The project consists of a live performance, staged at the Berlin Biennale ‘No Haus Like Bau’ (2008) and two films ‘Better Future: Wolf Shaped’ (2008) and ‘The Future is Now’ (2009), which use the 2005 IKEA riot (at the opening of a new store in Edmonton) as the starting point for consideration of post-1989 politics. Both the performance and the films use stage sets constructed from IKEA flat-pack furniture to echo the aesthetics of Modernism and the avant-garde. This transposes early twentieth century utopian ideology onto a present day setting where mass uprisings are motivated by cheap commodities. In its restaging of this event the series explores the possibility of communitarian collective action emerging from the complex capitalist relations inherent in a consumer riot. By re-evaluating Bauhaus theatre theory (and the theories of biomechanics which informed it), ‘No Haus Like Bau’ uses re-enactment as a retrograde tactic. Its purpose on the one hand is to invoke trajectories for alternate futures that never materialized at an originary moment. On the other hand, the clash of past forms with present content serves to accentuate the historical changes that have thrown into question these forms. Rather than reflecting the present, the projection of the past into a fictional future aims to destabilize the dominant narrative that suggests the current configuration of art, politics and human nature has always been this way. The significance of the project is such that it has been widely exhibited internationally (including and supported by Film London and Arts Council England). In addition their essay on re-enactment, their own work and this strategy for performance was published in Memory [MIT] [Ian Farr- ed.], Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. The project also formed the basis of a solo exhibition at Te Tuhi Art Centre, Auckland in 2010
