2019 서울도시건축비엔날레에서 만나는 네덜란드 2 – 주제전

Dutch Participation in the 2019 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism – Thematic Exhibition

SBAU2019 Thematic Exhibition 

• Date: 7 September 2019 – 10 November 2019
• Exhibition Venue: DDP Design Pathway + Design Exhibition hall
• Main Curator: Beth Hughes

Beth Hughes is the Head of Architecture at the Royal College of Art. Educated in Australia, she graduated from the University of Technology Sydney where she later taught. From 2004 – 2009 Beth was an Associate at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, (OMA — Rem Koolhaas). In 2009 joined as a partner at Point Supreme Architects in Athens, Greece and in 2011 established her own practice now based in London.

• Thematic Exhibition:

‘Collective Cities’ seeks to question how modes of collective practice and action can challenge the current paradigms of development of our cities and offer resistance to the dominant systems of spatial production. The biennale seeks to reflect on new models of co-existence, social practice, governance, research and speculation, to suggest alternative concepts of architecture, the city and the environment and to interrogate architecture’s political agency.
The Thematic Exhibition is an invitation to radically reimagine the structure of our cities, a provocation to fundamentally reprioritise, shifting focus from the success of the individual and capital through real-estate speculation and the commodification of land, to foreground collective rights and to claim the city as a shared investment.
Participants’ work ranges from critiques on the contemporary processes of urbanization, exploration of ecological and infrastructural systems and questions of material and production, to testing alternative models of development through typological innovation, new forms of tenure and land ownership, architecture as a form of mediation and consultation, to expanding and defining new territories.
The curatorial project juxtapositions research and propositions from diverse scales and forms of global action, imbricating potentially dissonant epistemologies. The intention being that the potential richness and legacy of the biennale is what can be revealed at the intersection of these conflated scales and practices, to unravel preconceptions within the field and proffer new ontologies as a space of proposition for new forms of existence.

Dutch Participation in the Thematic exhibition 1 – I DID NOT KNOW THE WORLD IS SO BIG

– STEALTH.unlimited (Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen), Jere Kuzmanić, Predrag Milić

• Project:

Looking back from 2029, through a series of posters, this future fiction gives a glimpse into the reality of a self-proclaimed pool of ‘misfits’. Following the Global Financial Crisis (2008), they started building infrastructures to collectively break ground for a different future – for new forms of living, for work beyond the reality of jobs, for an economy beyond growth, for a radical energy transition, for cities based in commons. However, today these are merely enterprises of collective survival floating between Belgrade, Split, Rotterdam and beyond, trying to strengthen the ties before the promise of the climate collapse comes true. “If anything, the coming ten years are testing if we’re well accompanied. Well enough to make it through.” These words indicate a spell, bound to unfold, and indeed, that is how they observe much of the future lying ahead.

• Participants Biography:

STEALTH.unlimited (2000, Rotterdam/Belgrade) are Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen. Initially trained as architects, their work is equally based in the context of contemporary art and culture. Their recent book Upscaling, Training, Commoning features what it means to distance from a set of economics, architectures and politics devoid of future.

Jere Kuzmanić (Split/Zagreb) pioneers as architect, urbanist, and researcher degrowth and new forms of social and environmental responsibility in the field of urban survival. He has collaborated with Stealth.unlimited for the abovementioned project, and contributed to the ‘Architecture of Appropriation’ publication. Also, he will participate in the Netherlands Symposium 〈Frames of Resistance〉 as a speaker on 6th September.

Predrag Milić (Belgrade/Vienna) is a trained architect and urban researcher working between urban development and critical pedagogy, and particularly the oppressed, silenced, and the poor people of Belgrade’s urban periphery.

Dutch Participation in the Thematic exhibition 2 – PLACES OF PRODUCTION, ALUMINIUM

– Noura Al-Sayeh and Anne Holtrop

• Project:

The first aluminum smelter in the Gulf region was inaugurated in 1968 in Bahrain and is today the fourth largest single-site smelter in the world, continuing a history of metal trade that finds its roots in the third millennium BC. The presence of the smelter developed a local economy of aluminum- both formal and informal. Alongside, large locally based international companies producing typical by-products of aluminum, smaller workshops have developed with a focus on a smaller-scale production of aluminum. Today, aluminum stands as one of the strongest expressions of the contemporary evolution of the city, both in its application on the facades of new buildings, and in the re-cladding of older buildings, becoming synonymous with a projected image of modernity. Through an investigation of the gestures in the production processes of aluminum, the installation, using film, photography and a sand-casted aluminum prototype, is an attempt to understand the politics and production cycle of the material and to extract a different potential of its use.

• Participants Biography:

Anne Holtrop (1977 / Netherlands) started his own practice in 2009. Currently the studios are based in Amsterdam and Muharraq, Bahrain. In 2015 the first two major buildings, Museum Fort Vechten and the National Pavilion of the Kingdom of Bahrain, were completed. The studio is working on new stores worldwide for Maison Margiela with the first one set to open on Bruton Street in London later this year; an exhibition pavilion for CERN in France, and several UNESCO listed heritage buildings in Bahrain amongst which the Murad Boutique Hotel, the Siyadi Pearl Museum and the rehabilitation of Qaysariya Suq.

Anne Holtrop is an associate professor at the ETH in Zurich. He received the Charlotte Köhler Prize for Architecture by the Prince Bernhard Cultural Foundation in 2007 and in 2016 the prestigious Iakov Chernikhov International Prize. The 2G monograph series dedicated its 73rd issue to Studio Anne Holtrop in 2016.

Noura Al Sayeh-Holtrop is an architect and curator currently working at the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities (BACA) as Head of Architectural Affairs, where she is responsible for overseeing the planning and implementation of cultural institutions and museums as well as the creation of an active agenda of exhibitions.

Maitham Almubarak & Batool Shaikh will represent Studio Anne Holtrop by participating in the Netherlands Symposium 〈Frames of Resistance〉 as speakers on 6th September.

Dutch Participation in the Thematic exhibition 3 – IMAGE AND ARCHITECTURE #: TRIPITAKA KOREANA

– Bas Princen

• Project:

How close can a copy, an artistic depiction, or a photographic print come to an architectural object or space it depicts? The experience of moving through a space cannot be substituted with an image, but the relation between a viewer and the printed object can be intimate and direct. In the past several years, I have worked with a new photographic printing process, combining rice paper and high resolution digital files, resulting in life size image-objects, able to capture and transfer ‘material’ and ‘materiality’ of architectural spaces and artistic artefacts with marvelous fragility and depth. This allows for a new view of well-known spaces to be created, nearly as direct, one-to-one experiences of deliberately chosen details.

Work #11 in the series Image and Architecture captures The Tripitaka Koreana, the world’s greatest collection of Buddhist scriptures consisting of 81,258 wooden printing blocks, dating back to 1237. The collection, housed in four buildings at the Haein Temple, is a sacred space, albeit a space which is not monumental. It is an archive of knowledge that is meant to be reproduced, duplicated, disseminated. It is also a monument of crafts—the buildings in which the collection is kept are equipped with an ingeniously designed natural air-circulation system which has been able to preserve the blocks over millennia.

• Participant Biography: 

Bas Princen is an artist and photographer living and working in Rotterdam and Zurich. He was educated as an industrial designer at the Design Academy Eindhoven, and as an architect at the Berlage Institute. Since then, through photography, and through books, exhibitions and in situ installations, his work focuses on relationships between Image, Landscape and Architecture. His recent exhibitions include Image and Architecture (Vitra, 2018), Breuer Revisited (The Met, New York, 2017), Constructing Worlds (Barbican, London, 2014), Room of Peace at Monditalia (XIV Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2014).

In 2004, he published his first book Artificial Arcadia with 010 Publishers. Further monographs include Reservoir (Hatje Cantz, 2011), The Construction of an Image (Bedford Press, 2016), and The Room of Peace (Roma Publications, 2018).

In 2004, he won Charlotte Kohler Prize for young artists and architects in the Netherlands. In 2010, his collaborative work with Office KGDVS was awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture.

Bas Princen will participate in the Netherlands Symposium 〈Frames of Resistance〉 as a speaker on 6th September.

Published by Dutch Culture Korea