Informal Architectures: Space and Contemporary Culture

Informal Architectures (2004-2008) was a creation-research project that comprised a symposium and visual arts residency at The Banff Centre, an exhibition at Plug In ICA and the Walter Phillips Gallery, a symposium at Tate Modern, and a publication. The project supported several artist-led research residencies and commissions at The Banff Centre, including major works created by William Pope.L and Luanne Martineau. These works were exhibited in the exhibition alongside predominantly new and recent contemporary works. Funding was provided for the project by a Research-Creation in the Fine Arts grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, for which Anthony Kiendl was the principal investigator and project lead, along with a dynamic team of artist-researchers and curators including Candice Hopkins and Aoife MacNamara.

Informal Architectures portrays a contemporary landscape of social, political and cultural assumptions in the built environment in early 21st century western societies. In this landscape, progress, technology and consumerism are the primary vehicles of modernity, which still forms society’s dominant narrative. But waste, entropy and abjection form a ubiquitous and incessant counter-narrative to modernity’s utopian dream. Our conflicted present, recent-past and near future are re-contextualized by artists re-negotiating the built environment in and around modernity.  

While monumentality continues to haunt contemporary art and architectural practices in westernized societies, alternative strategies in spatial culture have proliferated since the 1960s. By taking into consideration the works of these and other artists, the canons of modern art and architecture may be re-contextualized. The artists in Informal Architectures visualize economies of both excess and lack —chocolate and dirt, shopping malls and ruins, humour and destruction—proposing alternative strategies and criteria for the creation, representation and inhabitation of space—or of how to be in the world.

Exhibiting artists: Lida Abdul, Edgar Arceneaux with Vincent Galen Johnson, Olga Koumoundouros, Matthew Sloly and Rodney McMillian, Eleanor Bond, Jimmie Durham, David Hoffos, Luanne Martineau, Gordon Matta-Clark, Rita McKeough, Ryan Nordlund, William Pope.L, and Kyohei Sakaguchi.