Untitled - Gaia Persico

URBAN ORIGAMI
Urban Origami is an exhibition
of seven international artists
who share a fascination with
the modern city. It surveys
contemporary artistic practice
that has an interest in the
explosion of urban dwelling,
with all its incongruous and
discordant aphorisms. It brings
together artists with a very
distinctive and varied approach
to underlining the attraction,
hold and sway the city has on
us, as well as the problematics
that come with its growth and
surplus products.
PM Gallery & House
Walpole Park, Mattock Lane
London W5 5EQ
Tuesday – Friday & Sunday
1-5pm
Saturday
11am-5pm
2 JULY – 29 AUGUST 2010
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Urban Origami
PM Gallery & House, Walpole Park, Mattock Lane, Ealing, London W5 5EQ
2 July – 29 August 2010
Published by ARTTRA
in collaboration with PM Gallery & House
ISBN 978-0-9557496-1-2
A catalogue record of this publication is available from the British Library.
© ARTTRA and contributors 2010.
All works of art © the artists.
Curator: Gaia Persico
Editor ARTTRA: Julian Johnson
PM Gallery & House Programmer: Carol Swords
Designed by Graziano Milano
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PM Gallery & House
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www.ealing.gov.uk/pmgalleryandhouse
URBAN ORIGAMI
CONTENTS
06
FOREWORD
GAIA PERSICO
08
CITIES THAT FOLD IN ON THEMSELVES
LAURA GONZALEZ
10
URBAN ORIGAMI
MATT PRICE
20
LEO FITZMAURICE
22
MATTHEW HOULDING
24
JOOLS JOHNSON
26
JOST MÜNSTER
28
GAIA PERSICO
30
ELISA SIGHICELLI
32
HAEGUE YANG
34
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
URBAN ORIGAMI 06 07
Below: Gaia Persico
From Union Square to Darling
Harbour (Detail), 2010.
Archival inkjet print on
hahnemühle paper.
477 x 51 cm.
GAIA PERSICO
FOREWORD
Urban Origami arrived as a concept in the form of
two-dimensional proposal paper in an envelope,
on the desk of Carol Swords, PM Gallery & House
Programmer, in December 2009. After a few meetings
with some folding and shaping, it began to take a
recognisable conceptual form. During the next weeks
many creases were ironed out, numerous new ones
formed, whilst others were left in their original
position, and seven months later I have the greatest
honour and extreme pleasure to present the final
construction.
Urban Origami is an exhibition of seven international
artists who share a fascination with the modern city.
It surveys contemporary artistic practice that has an
interest in the explosion of urban dwelling, with all its
incongruous and discordant aphorisms. It brings
together artists with a very distinctive and varied
approach to underlining the attraction, hold and sway
the city has on us, as well as the problematics that
come with its growth and surplus products.
In preparation for the redevelopment of Pitzhanger
Manor-House, aspects of Sir John Soane’s interests
have been used as a platform from which to choose
the artists in the show, as the exhibition seeks to view
some of his concerns through contemporary eyes.
Considered by some the father of modernism and
recycling, the works in the show have a direct relation
to his practice. Therefore displaced objects, salvaged
articles, leftover materials, assembled urban spaces,
an uncanny use of light and elements of surprise are
employed in an attempt to expound meaning behind
contemporary living, as existing models for modern
metropoleis are scrutinised, and new ones imagined.
These are places of duality; for many, the lure of the
city is inescapable, even with the knowledge that
environmental damage goes hand in hand with
expansion. Thus, the debris left behind by this
ever-increasing hunger becomes the focus of some
works, where obsolete computers are transformed
into minute worlds, conjuring up images of a future
devoid of human presence, strangely beautiful and
harmonious, as well as eerie and cold. Throwaway
objects are arranged together as if mapping a chaotic
bird’s-eye view of a visionary city, creating a sprawl
seemingly expanding before our presence. Low-tech
items are also employed to fabricate utopian models
of living or to re-imagine new versions of familiar
objects.
In other works, signage is stripped of any recognisable
features and becomes a generic symbol of the
language of communication found in any city’s
infrastructure, reflecting an abstract, yet poetic,
urbanisation. Additionally, cityscapes are removed of
surplus information, so that only the most salient
aspects may remain, thus leaving space for viewers to
fill in the gaps with their own conjectures, experiences
and memories. These become personal journeys
within the edges of the urban experience of
displacement, of otherness, of discovery, of fitting in
and trying to befriend the unknown. The works
highlight the overlooked, which often manifests itself
through images showing real spaces of unnoticed
urban poetry.
Urban Origami shows the many facets of metropolitan
development: with each new fold, it takes a different
form, expanding our experience of the modern city
and our understanding of its history.
URBAN ORIGAMI 08 09
the material is not readily available from suppliers,
he ventures into the city and collects the flyers, like
we do when we are interested in them. The critique
of labour, of the entertainment and information
industries, and of waste is present in his exquisite
and intelligent work.
LAURA GONZALEZ
Laura Gonzalez is a visual
artist and a research lecturer.
Her practice encompasses
drawing, photography, and
sculpture and her work has
been exhibited in the UK, Spain
and Portugal. When she is not
following Freud, Lacan and
Marx’s footsteps with her
camera, she lectures
postgraduate students at the
Glasgow School of Art.
She is currently immersed in
an interdisciplinary project that
investigates psychoanalytic
approaches to making and
understanding objects of
seduction within the fields of
fine art, consumption studies
and material culture. She has
contributed to debates around
knowledge production in the
creative disciplines.
Her research includes an
examination of parallels
between artistic and analytic
practices, a study of Manolo
Blahnik’s shoes as objects of
desire and the creation of a
psychoanalytically inspired
Discourse of the Artefact, a
framework enabling the
circulation of questions and
answers through a relational
approach to artworks.
WWW.LAURAGONZALEZ.CO.UK
Jools Johnson and Jost Münster, like Fitzmaurice,
have the environment in mind, but, this time, they
approach it through the poetic dimensions of the
disused. Johnson explores the auratic and the spiritual
in the experience of finding ourselves drawn to the
information and light networks in cities. These
irradiate, thus changing the space surrounding us,
mesmerising us, making us think. Not in vain he asks
the ultimate existential question: Will anyone miss
me..? This work is a pathos-filled cry not to be thrown
into the oblivion of time (through death and forgetting),
or space (in crowds), and it rightfully stands out.
CITIES THAT FOLD IN ON THEMSELVES
In his book on a fellow French philosopher, Gilles
Deleuze wrote: ‘the outside is not a fixed limit but a
moving matter animated by peristaltic movements,
folds and foldings that together make up an inside:
they are not something other than the outside, but
precisely the inside of the outside.’ Folds, understood
in this way, mark our experience of urban spaces.
Home makeover television shows popularly exemplify
this: when they say that they want to bring the garden
into the living room, they mean they want to create a
fold in our experience of space, a way of making sense
of the wild outside in the cosy inside represented by
the home. Deleuze’s fold is, of course, also a
metaphor for how we approach subjectivity, the
connection between our inner life, and our relation
to the other.
Cities are places for leisure and pleasure, for delight
and enchantment. We play, we live, we work in them.
Yet, they are also the locus of anxiety. This is
evidenced not only in the relation between people,
but architecturally: car parks, back alleyways, disused
plots, scaffolding, defaced urban furniture, corners
where people stand with no visible purpose heighten
our sense of alertness in the face of potential conflict.
It is also undeniable that cities are very creative, with
an array of opportunities for artists to show and share.
At the PM Gallery & House, we find two types of
spaces, common in any western metropolis: first,
the safe space of the gallery; then, the more unsettling
public home. In my short text, so far, I have termed the
home both cosy and unsettling and, although this may
seem paradoxical, it is no mistake. Indeed, Sigmund
Freud’s original word for what in English we know as
the uncanny was das unheimlich, literally the
unhomely, referring to something well known that
has, suddenly, been rendered strange. Each of the
seven artists in Urban Origami explores aspects of the
uncanny, as found in the cities we know or imagine.
As they do it, the insides are turned out, unfolded.
Nowhere is my statement more verifiable than in the
work of Haegue Yang. Just the titles and concepts
explored in her video trilogy show the mysteries of the
fold and the uncanny perfectly: while squandering
negative spaces is what cities are made of, unfolding
spaces are the task of the artist – in the gallery, the
home or outside – by means of the restrained courage
she elegantly proposes. In the almost accidentally
beautiful Holiday Story, she approaches yet another
contradiction, that of the relationship between work,
as labour, and holiday, as deferred gratification.
Humour and a certain satire mix with a social and
ecological conscience in Leo Fitzmaurice’s work.
His arrangements of flyers forming carpets update
traditions where flowers are used instead. Yet, he
recycles them, sourcing leftover, excess and out of
date material from art marketing distributors, printers
and recyclers. Sometimes, he also re-uses them from
previous installations. A sustainable approach does
not cloud his aesthetic judgment, however, so if he
has made a choice on colour and subject matter but
Below: Jools Johnson
God Lives in Detail IX, 2009.
Recycled Computer Parts.
11 x 31 x 28 cm.
Münster also asks questions, but this time, grounded
in the materiality and objecthood of the city and its
architecture. The elements that make the things we
know and use are the focus of our gaze and he shows,
through a play of balance and placement, a different
way of seeing them, one that is mischievous and
industrious at the same time.
In her video Phi Building and her Untitled light boxes,
Zip and Blue, Elisa Sighicelli explores that most
uncanny of experiences in a city: the night, interrupted
by bursts of light, where the beams hit, or are shaped
by, the architecture. This is a world of shadows and the
concealed, but also of brightness, seduction and
unparalleled beauty, where the homely and the
unhomely fold.
Gaia Persico’s animations and drawings speak of the
intimate connectedness of the world’s urban spaces.
In her work, a city could be any and all cities. Yet, if
looked at closely, there are moments of recognition,
affirming that she was there. There is also a sense of
marveling at surroundings, a contemplation that is not
devoid of a subjective point of view. Her Lonely Planet
book is consciously placed in the bedroom of the
house: it conjures our dreams – or nightmares – of the
places she represents, calling for our fantasy image of
them. And the fantasy, in this case, is a shared one.
With his modern, lush palaces, created with everyday
materials, Matthew Houlding also asks of us that we
fantasise, emphasising not only architecture but
lifestyle as well. His colourful and precise works are
tongue-in-cheek critiques of the built environment and
its surrounding space. We are asked to think and
consider what our ideas – and ideals – of tropics, the
ocean, paradise and social heaven are, while he gives
them form. His works are suspended in time, past,
present and futuristic at the same time, and, thus,
eternal. In this way, they offer a convincing backdrop
for our internal narratives. They put our imaginary to
work and give us, as viewers, a chance to inhabit them.
With Houlding and his fabulous dwellings, the
exhibition comes to a full circle, delineating its
perimeter: labour, sustainability, the existential, the
material, night, travel, and fantasies fold in on each
other. Urban Origami’s visual meditation makes visible
political positions, and our innermost thoughts and
desires melt into each other in a coherent, yet critical,
embrace. This is what cities do to us.
URBAN ORIGAMI 10 11
MATT PRICE
Matt Price is a writer, editor
and curator based in London
and Birmingham. Formerly
Managing Editor of Flash Art,
Milan, and Deputy Editor of
ArtReview, London, he has
also written for publications
including A-n, Art Monthly,
Frieze and Modern Painters.
He recently co-wrote Hatje
Cantz’s monograph on Adrian
Ghenie and contributed a
biography of Anish Kapoor
to the artist’s major new
monograph from Phaidon.
He has edited publications
on artists, architects and
designers including The
Campana Brothers, David
Adjaye, Ai Weiwei and Herzog
& de Meuron, Jitish Kallat,
Joep van Lieshout and Jaume
Plensa and is currently editing
publications for Koenig, Heni
and Phaidon. In the past two
years he has curated
exhibitions at the Palais de
Tokyo, Paris; Plan B, Berlin;
and Master Piper, London.
He has been invited to curate
an exhibition of British painting
for the next Prague Biennale.
WWW.MATTHPRICE.COM
The title of the exhibition, Urban Origami (conceived
and curated by contributing artist Gaia Persico) is a
poetic and evocative analogy that by playfully
referencing the traditional Japanese art form of paper
sculpture serves as an interesting point of departure
for considering contemporary art and its relationship
to ideas of the built environment. From a simple, often
flat starting point, complex structures can be created,
re-fashioned and transformed, and, equally for the
architect, artist and the practitioner of origami, the
more time, experience, knowledge, vision, ambition,
dedication and skill they have, the better the results
may be.
URBAN ORIGAMI
The built environment is never permanent – even the
world’s oldest surviving structures have changed by
means of the world changing around them, their
context, usage and meaning shifting as swiftly as the
generations who parade past them, both their
exteriors and interiors showing signs of the passing of
time. Most buildings, though, have a very limited life
span in the overall scheme of things, some surviving a
few hundred years or a handful of generations, others,
such as a 1970s shopping centre or a cheaply built car
park, lasting only a couple of decades, and yet others,
like a block of flats completed just before an
earthquake or a temporary wooden structure erected
for an outdoor performance, only existing for a matter
of weeks, days or hours. Buildings, and the towns and
cities they combine to make, are transient
manifestations of human activity, an articulation of
physical space for just a brief period of time.
In addition to coming into and going out of existence,
many buildings change during the course of their
lifetimes – a wall knocked through, an extension built,
a bank transformed into a bar, a church into a home.
For radical British architect Cedric Price (1934-2003)
time was the fourth dimension of a building, with
impermanence and adaptability key aspects of his
innovative thinking about structures and their use. In a
biography produced by the Design Museum, London,
the author asserts, ‘For Cedric Price, architecture was
not about the finished building but more about an
ability to enable and facilitate change in a changing
world and to “allow us to think the unimaginable”’.1
Buildings should not be considered static, fixed,
unchanging structures, but malleable, adaptable,
inspirational entities, the lives of which can be shaped
just as much as they can shape our own.
The PM Gallery & House, which hosts the exhibition
Urban Origami and for which the exhibition was
specifically conceived, is the perfect example of a
building that has both changed in its physical form and
in its purpose during its illustrious history. There had
been a house on the estate since at least the late 17th
Century when, in the early 19th Century eminent
architect of the day and surveyor to the Bank of
England, Sir John Soane, acquired Pitzhanger Manor
and its 28 acres of grounds in West London.2 Taking on
the manor, Soane retained some sections that had
been designed by his first employer, architect George
Dance, before setting about with his new plans for the
building.3 Having owned the renovated house for just a
few years, using it as a weekend retreat and venue for
entertaining, in 1810 he sold it.4 The building passed
through the hands of several owners before being
acquired in 1900 by Ealing District Council for use as a
public library – a library that ended up being built on
the grounds near the manor house. In 1985 the library
was moved to Ealing Broadway, and following
significant restoration to the house, the entire site is
currently being developed as a major cultural site,
including the house and gallery.5 For this exhibition,
the manor house itself is being used as the exhibition
venue, and almost becomes a part of the exhibition in
dialogue with the works on show.
The analogy between origami and the city is
demonstrated in the exhibition by the work of Leo
Fitzmaurice. Like an exponent of origami, the
Liverpool-based artist will often begin with a single
sheet of paper when creating a work of art, but rather
than sticking with just that one sheet, it is usually only
the first of many hundreds, possibly thousands of
sheets that pass through his hands on the way to
completing one of his works. Amassing out of date,
excess and leftover flyers sourced from marketing
distributors and printers, Fitzmaurice painstakingly
arranges them in intricate configurations, both in two
and three dimensions.
Right: Leo Fitzmaurice
I Knew This Without You Saying,
2005. Flyers. 800 x 2000 cm.
Installation at Firstsite Gallery,
Colchester.
Courtesy Firstsite Gallery,
Colchester.
In a piece created for the exhibition entitled IXOHOXI
(2010), the flyers are laid overlapping on the floor to
create an arresting geometric pattern suggestive of
dense futuristic urban road networks or a gigantic
housing estate or retail complex seen from high
above. The placement of the flyers leads to colours,
patterns, shapes and rhythms emerging as the
sequences evolve, culminating in an intense,
kaleidoscopic optical experience. In another part of the
work, hundreds of copies of the same flyer have been
carefully arranged into three-dimensional forms, the
edge of each flyer revealing just a little more visual
information than the one before. The effect is like that
of a fan or the pages of a flipbook, with the image of a
ballerina discernible across the spread. Standing
upright and seemingly unsupported, the sculptures
look like architect’s models for some kind of largescale advertising system or a digital zoetrope.
It’s interesting that the genesis of these flyer-based
works was a project by the artist in a tower block in
Liverpool in 2001 using junk mail.
The architectural and urban associations of
Fitzmaurice’s practice are most evident in this
exhibition, however, in I’ve Got You Out of My Mind
(2010), a floor-based piece in which dozens of
cardboard boxes including packaging from things such
as food products, cling film, ointments, tablets, and
URBAN ORIGAMI 12 13
cigarettes are arranged as if buildings in a city, vehicles
in a car park, or shipping containers at a depot. All text
and photographic imagery has been removed from the
packaging, enhancing the architectural qualities of the
boxes by giving the impression of windows whilst
simultaneously offering all manner of views into the
three-dimensional spaces within the boxes, making
them appear like rooms with diverse functions. The
artist’s use of such cheap and disposable materials not
only draws attention to society’s rampant
consumerism and often irreverent attitude to the
planet’s resources, but also makes an interesting
connection to architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas’s
notion of ‘Junkspace’: ‘If space-junk is the human
debris that litters the universe, Junk-Space is the
residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built […]
product of modernization is not modern architecture
but Junkspace’.6
Below: Jools Johnson
Pulse of a Hundred Suns (Detail),
2010. Mixed media (including
recycled computer screws).
The idea of Junkspace is equally relevant to the work
of Jools Johnson, who, not unlike Fitzmaurice, uses
recycled materials to create artworks that can appear
like architectural constructions and miniature cities.
Rather than paper, however, Johnson’s materials are
salvaged from defunct computers, the components of
which he laboriously dismantles before reconfiguring
them to create his sculptural pieces and installations.
In an ongoing body of work started in 2007, God Lives
in Detail, Johnson presents a variety of floor, plinth
and wall-mounted pieces that look like models for sets
of some fantastical science-fiction movie. In reusing
the computer parts – made from innumerable types of
modern metropolis that one might expect to see in
Beijing or Dubai. The lights dance on the ceiling of the
gallery like searchlights hitting clouds. Dramatic,
beautiful and unnerving in equal measure, it is a work
that finds its apotheosis in Pulse of a Hundred Suns
(2010) – a piece in which hundreds of screws of all
shapes and sizes are arranged in a long, thin,
panoramic skyline, illuminated by myriad bulbs behind
the translucent backdrop of a strip light unit.
plastics and metals originally designed for specific
purposes far beyond the knowledge of the average PC
user – Johnson devises a model world that is rich in
imagination and full of space for our own imaginations
to run wild: processors, chips and circuitry can
become a holiday resort, metal casing can be
transformed into a barn or silo, or a variety of curiously
shaped plastic components refashioned as a futuristic
industrial complex. And you don’t need to be an
architect or engineer to enjoy engaging with the works
in this way.
With a work specially created for the exhibition, God
Lives in Detail XVIII (2010), Johnson presents a tower
made entirely from computer parts, with platforms,
levels and architecture-like appendages throughout.
With miniature epic proportions, the tower presents a
disconcertingly dystopian vision of the built
environment – a world in which the organic and natural
are replaced entirely by synthetic materials and
machine-made shapes and forms, like a Tower of
Babel for the era of electronic computing.
anyone miss me..? (2010) in which the words of the
title are spelt out in lights, configured in the style of
the artist’s own handwriting. From out of his peopleless cityscapes, Johnson presents a lone voice that
articulates a fundamental question about human
existence.
A distinctly idealistic, optimistic and utopian approach
to architecture and the built environment comes in the
work of West Yorkshire-born, East Africa-raised and
once again West Yorkshire-based Matthew Houlding.
Far from producing pieces that speak of tired urban
spaces and buildings past their best, what Houlding
creates are models of incredible, fantastical modernist
structures, which, if they were to appear in property
magazines, would certainly be ‘price on application’.
These are the buildings that many modernist
architects of the 20th Century aspired to design,
that only the super rich could commission, or with
which forward-looking authorities would wish to
assert their enlightened credentials.
Houlding’s retro-futuristic models are complex and
beautiful structures of elegant lines and proportions,
satisfying geometry, glorious coloured windows,
engaging spaces, curious forms and subtle textures.
Floors overlap and jut out from one another, loosely
geodesic structures (reminiscent of Buckminster
Fuller) emerge on terraces or ledges, tropical plants or
trees spring up unexpectedly, exterior and interior
spaces merge seamlessly, and rooms fluctuate
between the useful and the whimsical.
Developing out of this piece is Aurora Angelorum
(2010) in which the artist has constructed visionary
cities built around ‘lakes’ out of computer screws and
casing. From beneath the work, blue and white lights
pulsate through a sequence of settings, sending
beams of light upwards, illuminating the screws as if
they were facades of skyscrapers and tower blocks.
In the darkened gallery space, it creates the
impression of a cityscape by night, the burgeoning
Above: Matthew Houlding
Maison Tropicale - Artist’s Housing,
2009. Mixed media.
37 x 43 x 35cm.
Courtesy the artist and
Ceri Hand Gallery.
Photography by Stephen King.
With more than a passing reference to the familiar
iconography of the Manhattan skyline silhouetted
against a sunset, Pulse of a Hundred Suns is an
unsettling and ethereal representation of humankind’s
physical presence on the Earth, but seemingly in a
solar system very different to our own. That Johnson’s
work leads into metaphysical and existential territory
is made clear in his fourth work in the show, Will
To anyone with even a passing interest in 20th Century
modernist architecture, the associations come quick
and fast, from Le Corbusier’s Centre Le Corbusier in
Zurich (1967) to Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus Museum in
Berlin (1979), from Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona
Pavilion (1929) to Lina Bo Bardi’s Glass House in São
Paulo (1951). Indeed, the more tropical side of
modernist architecture evinced by Bo Bardi and other
major Brazilian figures such as Oscar Niemeyer and
Paulo Mendes da Rocha, seems to have influenced
URBAN ORIGAMI 14 15
Houlding’s recent pieces on show in this exhibition, as
does the work of Jean Prouvé for the French colonies
in West Africa in the 1950s. Houlding’s piece entitled
Maison Tropicale - Worker’s Housing (2009) references
Prouvé’s three prototype buildings Les Maisons
Tropicales,7 and suggests that the politics of utopia are
as important to the artist as formalist concerns.
Below: Jost Münster
Things Have Changed, 2009.
Acrylic Paint, Wood.
61 x 16 x 32cm.
Courtesy Museum 52, London.
German-born, London-based artist Jost Münster
makes use of cheap and easily available materials to
create works that sit between sculpture, design and
painting. Often employing everyday wood, acrylic
paint and spray paint as his mediums, the artist makes
three-dimensional forms that mix modernist
aesthetics with a lo-fi ethos. In Things Have Changed
(2009) Münster presents a wall-mounted white shelf
on which two wooden constructions sit. The first looks
like a tatty road sign seen from behind, while the
second, a little behind and on the right, appears like a
primitive and somewhat worn bus shelter or boarded-
connection between the history of
modernist, minimalist painting and
throwaway architecture or design.
The run-down urban environment
suggested by Münster’s painted
wooden assemblages points towards a
failed modernist agenda, the aspirations
of architects and city planners from
recent generations reduced to
economic decline and neighbourhoods
you wouldn’t want to live in.
up garage forecourt. The dirty wooden panels of the
back of the ‘road sign’ and ‘bus shelter’ are
counterpoised by the vertical poles supporting each
structure, with that of the sign painted in yellow and
black strips, that of the shelter in a light blue. The
injection of colour brings a certain charm to the shabby
scene, introducing a sense of nostalgia to the work,
evoking urban scenarios – familiar to everyone – built
in the 60s, 70s or 80s that are now derelict or
desperately awaiting regeneration.
A sense of the effects of time on buildings and
structures is an aspect that underlies Münster’s
practice, and is evident in several recent pieces by the
artist, particularly in To the Left (2009) in which
rectangular blocks of wood are arranged in the shape
of wall. The blocks might be interpreted as bricks,
configured in a grid. The significantly sized wall created
is largely grey, beige and creams, all scuffed so as to
seem filthy and past their prime. Indeed, one has the
impression that the blocks might once have been the
same colour, now in varying states of decay whether
through sunlight, exposure to the elements, or
pollution. Painted shapes on some of the bricks
suggest that the wall might have been painted over,
had fly-posters partially removed, graffiti cleaned or
old hand-painted signs erased. The clearly defined
edges on some bricks imply that they may even have
originally been in different structures and hastily
reassembled, as if building blocks.
In Just About (2010) presented in the exhibition,
Münster displays a thin rectangular strip of wood that
stands vertically from the floor. It is held in place at the
top by a thin yellowish rectangular frame that is
slightly wider on one side than the width of the
wooden strip it supports. The top section of the
wooden panel is painted with acrylic paint in dirty
white while the lower section is painted black. A small
white strip at the bottom is painted in a slightly
brighter white. Perhaps some homemade device for a
garage, a sign for a cheap shop or a leftover panel from
a DIY cupboard, the work makes an understated
Above: Haegue Yang
Trilogy, 2004-2006. Video stills.
From top: Unfolding Places, 2004
Filmed in London and Seoul.
Voice-over: Helen Cho.
Restrained Courage, 2004
Filmed in Amsterdam, Frankfurt,
London, Seoul and Berlin.
Voice-over: Camille Hesketh
Squandering Negative Spaces, 2006
Filmed in Brazil. Voice-over: David
Michael DiGregorio.
Courtesy Galerie Barbara Wien
Wilma Lukatsch, Berlin.
The idea of the modern city in both
ascendancy and decline is addressed in
the work of Seoul-born and Seoul and
Berlin-based Haegue Yang. In Trilogy
(2004-6) the artist presents three
narrated films exploring aspects and
issues relating to cities, architecture
and urban existence in different
contexts around the world. In the third
part of the trilogy, Squandering
Negative Spaces, the narrator
discusses a place called Incheon,
described as neither being a rural area
nor a part of Seoul, near which it is
located. The city is best known for its
new airport, built by filling in the stretch
of water between two islands. While
the airport itself is very much state of
the art, the artist speaks of the mixed
urban context around it, and in particular
of one district in which she finds small Japanese-style
houses, strange and unidentifiable commercial
premises, old roads that are not wide enough for cars,
and decaying houses. To the artist, it feels partly
abandoned and that time has stopped, raising the
question as to what gets taken forward and what gets
left behind in urban regeneration.
The trilogy is very much about travel to, between and
around cities, with footage on foot, from train
windows and on planes. Incidents and events are
recounted, such as a bus journey with a loud woman
on her mobile arguing with a drunk man, a child
screaming in the flat upstairs, a beggar being beaten
by a policeman, a mother and her sick daughter on a
long train journey in Germany. Footage switches
between cities such Seoul and São Paulo, Amsterdam,
London and Berlin. The locations of the narrative do
not always correspond to the cities or countries of the
footage, creating a busy collage of images and words
that can be geographically and culturally disconcerting
at times. Many scenes could be from any of the cities
in which the artist filmed, others are more clearly
identifiable.
With its active interest in globalisation, urban
homogenisation, and the changing nature of modern
cities in Asia, Yang’s Trilogy is very much in the spirit of
Cities on the Move (1997-2000), the immense and
era-defining ever-evolving travelling exhibition by Hans
Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru. In the first part of Yang’s
cycle of films, Unfolding Places, colourful geometric
origami is filmed strewn on the ground, in and around
a puddle, being blown about by the wind. Later on in
the film, more brightly coloured paper sculptures are
arranged as if to constitute a strange and beautiful city
on a white floor. Black paint is then sprayed finely over
the paper model city, turning everything black, as if
covered by an oil slick. Perhaps the spark of inspiration
for the title of the exhibition, Yang’s origami scenes
symbolise the process and speed with which urban
expansion and renovation can become the faded,
disposable and undesirable physical fabric that is
illustrative of Koolhaas’s concept of Junkspace.
The ability to travel to different cities easily and
relatively cheaply in comparison to a generation ago
has come in tandem with, and been a factor in,
globalisation and the changing nature of cities today.
Italian-born, London-based artist Gaia Persico is
perhaps the ultimate example of an artist whose work
addresses the themes of cities around the world,
having made work in around 60 cities in recent years,
from Chicago to Hong Kong, Lagos to Sydney. In every
URBAN ORIGAMI 16 17
city she visits she will stay in a hotel and make
drawings, on hotel headed paper, of whatever she can
see from the window of her room. Sometimes they
are more picturesque views but more often they are
quotidian scenes, average backstreets, semi-industrial
must surely merge into a stream of interwoven
memories. It is interesting that one of her works for
this exhibition, entitled From Union Square to Darling
Harbour (2010) takes the form of a long thin print
offering a panoramic cityscape comprised of intricate,
engaging and charming drawings the artist made in 59
hotel rooms around the world. Where one city ends
and the next begins is virtually impossible to decipher,
offering a fantastical joined-up journey starting in San
Francisco and ending in Sydney. One might say that
we have been around the world in 59 hotel rooms…
areas, commercial districts or residential streets – the
day-to-day reality of cities rather than their faces for
tourism.
Over 300 of her pen and pencil drawings are
presented in the exhibition in the form of a book,
Lonely Planet (2010) ranging from quick sketches or
details that have caught her eye to detailed studies of
buildings or cityscapes. With the hotels’ logos,
branding, design and details prominently displayed on
the sheets on which Persico makes her drawings, they
become more like documents or objects than simply
drawings – a form of proof or record of having been in
each place making the drawings. An unusual and very
special kind of travelogue, the Hotel Drawings build up
into a remarkable survey of the urban environment as
it is presented to the artist through whatever appears
to be beyond the window of the room in which she
finds herself staying.
Travelling so frequently to so many far-away
destinations must be incredibly disorienting, but for
someone as used to it as Persico, the experiences
Left page: Gaia Persico
From Union Square to Darling
Harbour (Detail), 2010.
Archival inkjet print on
hahnemühle paper.
477 x 51 cm.
But Persico’s use of drawings from hotel rooms does
not end with static images as she also creates digital
animations based on her drawings, entitled World
Animations (2005/10). Carefully documenting all the
things that she observes moving in any one location
by day or night, she faithfully renders these in motion
in her images. In a scene from a hotel room in Chicago
we see a hotel or residential block opposite. Some
windows have lights on, and those without blinds
reveal modern, tidy rooms within. In one of these
rooms, a door opens and closes, though there are no
people present. In another animation from a hotel in
Seattle, the city’s skyline is depicted against a dark
blue night sky, with the Seattle Space Needle brightly
illuminated, replete with flashing lights and moving lift.
From her room in Sydney we see an office block that
looks as though it is being prepared for use or in the
process of being cleared, suggested by a stepladder
and cables and the absence of any computers. On the
floor above, lights slowly come on and go down. In
Singapore, modern architecture with complicated
geometric forms protrudes into the cityscape, a
couple of tennis courts nestled between them and the
buildings behind. In the distance the façade of a
building covered with electric lights flashes on and off,
as they do across buildings in her pieces from Hong
Kong. Featured in the exhibition in an installation
entitled Closed Circuits (2010) the films are presented
as if surveillance footage on multiple monitors in a
security office, offering a remarkable and striking
representation of urban existence today.
The façades of buildings illuminated by electric lights
in Asian cities that appear in Persico’s work are also a
prominent feature in a work by Turin-born and
Turin- and London-based artist Elisa Sighicelli.
Phi Building (2006) takes the form of a video loop in
which the camera is pointed at the front of a
skyscraper in Shanghai. The building has hundreds of
LED lights attached to the façade, which are used to
advertise brands and products with a colourful
sequence of digital patterns and geometric shapes –
the building becomes one giant screen. Sighicelli has
edited out all the text and product images that appear,
leaving just the abstracted geometric patterns. Similar
to 1980s computer graphics or those of fruit
machines, on a large scale these patterns make for an
impressive night-time show. Not a phenomenon that
is common in the West (perhaps with the exception of
Las Vegas) the illumination of a building in this way
demonstrates both the rise of China as an economic
and political power and the success of the electronics
industries that have contributed much to Asia’s
booming economy in recent years.
The relationships between architecture, space, light
and time are important in Sighicelli’s practice, and are
continued in the exhibition in two partially back-lit
photographs mounted in light boxes, Untitled (Blue)
(2006) and Untitled (Zip) (2007). Speaking to John Yau
of the Brooklyn Rail about her light box pieces earlier
this year, Sighicelli explains: ‘It’s not like a normal light
box with the transparency evenly lit. In my work, only
some areas are lit up and others don’t have the light
going through the photo and this creates different
spatial planes, it gives it more depth […]; some of the
works are painted on the back. The photo is mounted
on opaque Plexiglas that you don’t see. It’s painted
black in certain areas so you have to imagine that it’s
like a mask that stops the light from going through the
photograph, so the object becomes more three
dimensional’.8 The resulting images are dark, slightly
intimidating or foreboding depictions of structures
emitting or being hit by light. As interested by what is
behind or supporting structures as by how they are
URBAN ORIGAMI 18 19
intended to be seen by those who created them,
Sighicelli’s work invites us to look obliquely at the city
as a vehicle for the communication of information
through buildings and electric light.
Below: Elisa Sighicelli
Phi Building, 2006.
Video installation.
2’23” video loop, colour.
Sound by Paolo Campana.
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, London.
In his aforementioned essay on Junkspace, Koolhaas
laments the fact that so much of what has been built
in the 20th and 21st Centuries has been low-grade,
short-lived architecture, asserting ‘We do not leave
pyramids’. In contrast to this, Cedric Price argued that
buildings should only exist for a pre-determined
lifespan or for as long as they are needed, famously
stipulating that his Inter-Action building for Kentish
Town in 1971 should be pulled down 20 years after
going up. The exhibition Urban Origami contributes
many different and stimulating ideas to our
understanding of architecture and the built
environment, exploring the contemporary city in its
myriad forms in the age of travel, communication,
mass-production and globalisation. In its context at
the PM Gallery & House in West London, it asks us
to consider the very building in which the show takes
place, and the city in which the manor and estate have
been undergoing such dramatic changes since the day
they were built. What form will PM Gallery & House
take in 100 years, and what will its purpose be then?
1
Design Museum, London, website:
http://designmuseum.org/design/cedric-price
2
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitzhanger_Manor
3
Ibid.
4
Ealing District Council website:
www.ealing.gov.uk/services/leisure/museums_and_galleries/pm_gallery_
and_house/history/
5
Ibid.
6
Koolhaas, Rem. Junkspace, October, Vol. 100, Spring 2002, p.175.
7
Prouvé’s three prototype houses were removed from their original locations in
the Republic of Congo in 2000 and restored, following which one was
purchased by New York-based hotelier and residential property developer
André Balazs and was presented on loan outside Tate Modern in 2008.
www.lamaisontropicale.com
8
Brooklyn Rail, February 2010:
www.brooklynrail.org/2010/02/art/elisa-sighicelli-with-john-yau
Right: Sir John Soane (1753-1837)
Pitzhanger Manor-House, 1804.
Photography by John Sturrock.
Courtesy PM Gallery & House.
URBAN ORIGAMI 20 21
LEO FITZMAURICE
Born in Shropshire in 1963,
studying in Liverpool and
Manchester. After leaving
college Fitzmaurice initiated in
collaboration with Neville
Gabie Further Up in the Air, a
Liverpool tower block project
that received international
plaudits. This and other
international projects lead him
to develop Detourist, an
ongoing itinerant project
originally in collaboration with
Marie Anne McQuay. Last year
he devised with Paul Rooney
the bookwork Wrongteous,
listed as a Granta book of the
year, and the book project Post
Match with Locus+, Newcastle.
In 2010 Fitzmaurice completed
the commission Panoramia for
The Lowry in Salford. He is
currently showing work in From
Here to There, Arts Council
Collection, Herbert Art Gallery
& Museum, Coventry, UK;
Broken if Better, Seventeen
Gallery, London. Up coming
shows include Unmade, Henry
Moore Institute, Leeds, UK.
Fitzmaurice has work in many
public and private collections
including the Arts Council
Collection, Manchester Art
Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture
Park and Harewood House.
WWW.LEOFITZMAURICE.COM
Right: Leo Fitzmaurice
I’m Getting You Out of My Mind,
2010. Installation.
Project Space Leeds
URBAN ORIGAMI 22 23
MATTHEW HOULDING
Born in Keighley, West
Yorkshire, brought up in East
Africa and currently lives and
works in Todmorden, West
Yorkshire. He studied at
Loughborough College of Art &
Design from 1986-1990.
Solo shows include: The
Chemosphere, 2010, The New
Art Gallery, Walsall, UK; Sons
of Pioneers, 2009, Ceri Hand
Gallery, Liverpool and De La
Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea,
UK; We Watched the Sun Go
Down, 2007, Buro Fur Kunst,
Dresden, Germany. Group
shows include: The Library of
Babel/ In and Out of Place
- Zabladowicz Collection, 2010,
176, London, UK; Kurt Schmidt
(1901-1991) und andere.
AvantgardKunstler als Erben
des Bauhauses, 2009,
Kunstsammlung Gera Orangerie, Gera, Germany;
Maquettes en Modellen...,
2008, Stedelijk Museum, Aalst,
Belgium; British Art Show 6,
2005-2006, Gateshead,
Manchester, Nottingham and
Bristol, UK.
Represented by Ceri Hand
Gallery, Liverpool and Buro Fur
Kunst, Dresden, Germany.
WWW.MATTHEWHOULDING.CO.UK
Right: Matthew Houlding
NKB Bearings, 2009.
Mixed media.
60 x 60 x 35cm.
Courtesy the artist and
Ceri Hand Gallery.
Photography by Stephen King.
URBAN ORIGAMI 24 25
JOOLS JOHNSON
Born in Wrexham, Wales in
1974, lives and works in
London. Since completing an
MA Painting at the University
of the Arts, London, in 2002,
Johnson’s practice has evolved
into predominately conceptual,
installation and construction
work that has been widely
exhibited within the UK and
recently internationally.
Recent exhibitions include
Precious, 2010, Hove Museum
& Art Gallery and National
Touring Show, UK; Unsound
Practice, 2009, Dutch Kills
Gallery, New York; National
Eisteddfod, 2009, Bala, UK;
Artworks Open 2009, Artworks
Space, London; A Patch of
Grass Painted to Look like a
Rock, IPS, Gent, Belgium. In
2009 he was selected for a
Sustainable Art Award, BASH
Studio, London and for the Hun
Gallery International 2009, Hun
Gallery, New York; short-listed
for the biennial Sir Leslie
Joseph Young Artist Award
2009, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery,
Swansea, UK; Concrete
Dreams, APT Gallery, London;
Shortlisted for the touring
show Profilo d’Arte Painting
Award 2008, Museo della
Permanente, Milan, Italy.
WWW.JOOLSJOHNSON.COM
Right: Jools Johnson
Aurora Angelorum, 2010.
Mixed media (including recycled
computer screws and computer
components).
H 139 x W 32 x D 26.5 cm.
Left page: Jools Johnson
Aurora Angelorum (Detail), 2010.
URBAN ORIGAMI 26 27
Below: Jost Münster
To the Left, 2009.
Acrylic Paint, Wood. 244 x 360cm.
Courtesy Museum 52, London.
Left page: Jost Münster
Friends and Family, 2010 and
Just About, 2010. Installation View.
Courtesy Museum 52, London.
JOST MÜNSTER
Born in Ulm, Germany.
He studied at the Fine Art
Academy in Stuttgart and
Goldsmiths College in London.
He lives and works in London.
Münster has exhibited in
both Europe and the US, with a
recent solo exhibition at
Museum 52, London and the
Kunstverein Friedrichshafen,
Germany. A review of his solo
exhibition Ground Control has
been published in ArtForum,
May 2010.
Recent group exhibitions
include Mexican Blanket, 2010,
Museum 52, London; The Royal
Republic, 2009, Master Piper,
London; A Sort of Night to the
Mind, A Kind of Night for Our
Thoughts, 2009, Herbert Read
Gallery, Canterbury, UK;
Celestial Suitcase, 2009, 476
Jefferson Street, New York;
Hypersurface FX, 2009, Margini
Arte Contemporanea, Massa,
Italy; Thames Mudlarks, 2008,
CTRL Gallery, Houston, USA;
Layer Cake, 2007, Fabio Tiboni
Arte Contemporanea, Bologna,
Italy. His work has been
selected for Artfutures 2007,
Bloomberg Space, London;
John Moores 26, 2010,
Liverpool Biennal, Walker Art
Gallery, Liverpool, UK.
WWW.JOSTMUENSTER.NET
URBAN ORIGAMI 28 29
Below and left page: Gaia Persico
World Animations, 2005-2010.
Animation stills.
Part of Closed Circuits, 2010.
CCTV monitors installation.
Supported by the National Lottery
through Arts Council England.
GAIA PERSICO
Born in Italy in 1972, she
studied at WSA and lives and
works in London.
Recent solo shows include:
Transient Residence, 2009,
Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown,
UK; The Tower and The Well,
2008, Monika Bobinska Gallery,
London. Group shows include:
Outsider, 2010, Oriel Myrddin
Gallery, Carmarthenshire, UK;
Paper City: Urban Utopias,
2009, Royal Academy of Arts,
London; The Jerwood Drawing
Prize 2009, Jerwood Space,
London; Unsound Practice,
2009, Dutch Kills Gallery, New
York, 4th International Drawing
Competition, 2009, Wroclaw,
Poland. Further group shows
have been at Contemporary Art
Society, Gasworks, Fieldgate
Gallery, fa projects, London;
g39, Wales; Festival for the
Arts and Media, Yokohama,
Japan; East International,
Norwich, UK. In 2008 she was
awarded the first prize in the
Oriel Davies Open and
commissioned by Blueprint
Magazine to create a drawing
for Paper Cities. Persico also
curated the group show Isobar,
2007, Fieldgate Gallery,
London, partly funded by The
Henry Moore Foundation.
WWW.GAIAPERSICO.COM
URBAN ORIGAMI 30 31
ELISA SIGHICELLI
Born in Turin, Italy, in 1968,
where she currently lives
and works.
Since receiving her MFA from
the Slade School of Fine Art in
London, Sighicelli has exhibited
her work in many renowned
public institutions including:
Palazzo delle Papesse Centro
Arte Contemporanea, Siena,
Italy; Fondation Salomon,
Annecy France; Centro Galego
de Arte Contemporánea,
Santiago de Compostela,
Spaign; MCA, Sydney,
Australia; Hertzliya Museum,
Tel Aviv, Israel’ Venice Biennale
2009, Italy.
Fluctuation between stillness
and motion, video and
photography, Sighicelli’s work
scrutinizes ordinary things, in
an attempt to make them
intensely ordinary. In her work,
images are revealed through
light; darkness transforms
reality and allows the image to
be open and suggestive. The
artist has also participated in
various solo and group
exhibitions in Milan, New York,
Los Angeles, London, Paris and
Turin. She is represented by
Gagosian Gallery and in Italy by
Giò Marconi, Milan.
WWW.ELISASIGHICELLI.COM
WWW.GAGOSIAN.COM
Below: Elisa Sighicelli
Untitled (Blue), 2006.
Partially back-lit photograph
on lightbox. 90 x 123 x 6cm.
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, London.
Photographic credit Prudence
Cuming Associates Ltd.
Right page: Elisa Sighicelli
Phi Building, 2006.
Still from video 2’23” loop, colour.
Sound by Paolo Campana.
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, London.
URBAN ORIGAMI 32 33
HAEGUE YANG
Born in Seoul in 1971. She
currently lives and works in
Berlin and Seoul.
Known for her recent
exposure at the Venice
Biennale 2009 both in the
Korean Pavilion as well as
Arsenale, Yang works with
various media, ranged from
large scaled-sensorial
installation to juxtaposed
graphic works or semi
documentary photographic
pieces as well as small-scaled
objects. Influenced from
conceptual and institutional
critical practices as well as
current social and philosophical
studies about singular/plural
being she is especially
interested in formation of
abstract language, containing
individual narrative, that stems
from history, literature as well
as political realities.
She had solo shows at Sala
Rekalde, Bilbao; REDCAT, Los
Angeles; Portikus, Frankfurt;
and Cubitt, London. Recent
group exhibitions include: 2nd
Turin Triennial, 2008, Turin,
Italy; Guangzhou Triennial,
2008, Guangzhou, China; 55th
Carnegie International, 2008,
Pittsburgh, USA; Kunstverein,
2008, Hamburg, Germany.
WWW.HEIKEJUNG.DE
Right: Haegue Yang
Series of Vulnerable Arrangements Blind Room, 2006.
Installation view.
Black aluminum venetian blinds,
three video essays (Trilogy,
2004-2006), MDF, spotlight, mirror,
humidifier, infrared heater, air
ventilator, origami, photocopies,
found objects, seating, scent
emitters (Wood Fire and Fresh
Linen).
Courtesy Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis, T. B. Walker
Acquisition Fund, USA.
Photography by Gene Pittman.
GAIA PERSICO
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank all the artists who chose to exhibit
their works in Urban Origami, for their interest in the
project and their helpfulness in responding to all my
many requests.
My most heart-felt thanks to Carol Swords, who gave
me the opportunity to exhibit Urban Origami within
the fantastic spaces of PM Gallery & House and the
wonderful world of Pitzhanger Manor, for her
unwavering belief in the project and support
throughout the past seven months. I would also like
to thank the gallery team, Zoe Archer, Nadia Burns
and Anne Ninivin for their constant enthusiasm, and
all technicians and assistants who helped to put the
show together.
The writers of the articles in this publication, Laura
Gonzalez and Matt Price, deserve my sincere
admiration and all my appreciation for responding so
professionally and with such generosity to my late
requests for written works, and also to the designer
Graziano Milano who managed to realise a catalogue
in extremely stringent times, thank you for all your
patience and all those late-nights.
Also I would like to thank the galleries for their
generosity in loaning the works in Urban Origami and
for their support in sourcing images for the publication,
especially Ceri Hand of Ceri Hand Gallery, Lucy
Chadwich at Museum 52, London, Barbara Wien at
Barbara Wien Gallery, Berlin and Katharina
Schwerendt.
I am immensely grateful for the sponsorship from the
National Lottery through Arts Council England without
which the installation Closed Circuits would never
have been realised, and also for the financial,
conceptual and practical support of the architect Laila
Piana. I am really appreciative of the help from Neil
Howard, Public Space CCTV Manager at Ealing
Council and Jeff Green of Stanley Security Solutions.
Additional thanks also to LDJ Design and Display Ltd,
Colin Adley of Caddot Services and Darren Taylor of
Eco Computer Systems for their help in the realisation
of some of the other installations in the exhibition.
Lastly I would like to thank MWL Print Group for their
support in printing this catalogue, as well as Jacqui
Melmoth without whose prompting the project would
have remained a two-dimensional proposal paper in
an envelope.
PM Gallery & House was established in
1996 as West London’s largest contemporary
arts venue. Its remit is to serve the visual
arts needs of the local, national and
international communities and over the last
14 years it has shown over 90 exhibitions.
This unique space comprises a contemporary
art gallery and grade one listed house home
of the architect Sir John Soane.
The programme covers all mediums and
work is exhibited in the Pitzhanger ManorHouse as well as the gallery. The curatorial
staff are leaders in the field of initiating
contemporary art in historical settings.
A comprehensive educational policy
accompanies every exhibition as well as
stand alone educational projects initiated
and carried out by the Education and
Learning Programmer.
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