Exhibition

SUBTLE CONSTRUCTION

24th November 2011 - 15th January 2012

Plataforma Revolver Lisboa, group exhibition

Museu Berardo Olive Tree garden, performance, Lisboa

Artists: Carlos Bunga, Matias Machado, Cristian Rusu, Sancho Silva, Yukihiro Taguchi, Sinta Werner, Hironari Kubota. 

The exhibition Subtle Construction is meant to explore the potentialities of built space and to investigate transformable architecture. It will take into consideration the flexible, performative and generative qualities of architecture. The project has a starting point an understanding of architecture that is not connected to a certain medial device or visual form. It is concentrated on ephemerous architecture and transitiory forms of building processes. The artists involved work with architectural space in a plurality of media like drawing, installation, performance, animation, object. The works deal with empty space, absence of action and narration, the reverse side of visibility. They make possible the experience of a virtual dimension of their environments by bringing into consciousness unmanifested potentialities of places, situations, objects. These become actual, experienceable, through complex building processes, which the artist perform, document, re-enact.

Subtle Construction intends to propose an investigation of contemporary possibilities of realization of the virtual, which is not dependent on digital means, but which carry the philosophical awarenesses of the digital era. Constructions result from processes that superpose spaces and various temporalities with extremely minimal, basic modes of dealing with space and the object. All the works have in common a concern with an analytical representation of space and a quotidian approach, that is close to the receptors and interacts with them processually. The performativity, by which the natural affirmative, expressive power of situations and environments is perceived as active, brings movement into space and generates transformation process. The works are meditations on historical presence, patters of representation, on theatricality, and bring a register of intensity in architecture.

As part of Subtle Construction is also the performative sculpture of Hironari Kubota The spinning idol ~ 千手観音Senjyu-Kannon which will be performed on the15th and 19th November and shown until the 31st of December 2011 in the CCB Olive Tree Garden and is supported by the Berardo Collection.

The work of Hironari Kubota is a mixture between elements of ancestral believes of Japanese culture, industrial and postindustrial elements and brings to life rituals and acts that are resignified by the artist according to his own contemporary spirituality. His actions delimit a space whose symbolic capital releases a tension that provokes regeneration of the given situation. While working with the forces that are latent in the elements, he uses analogue, minimal technics and poses the problem of fundamental devices of “form giving”. The heavy sculptures begin to move in an elementary manner, but with a temporality that seems to belong to foreign temporal cycles. Hironari Kubota is constructing his works during many months of very persistent work. Nevertheless his performances last only around 30 minutes, in which elements of pop urban culture mix with religious ritualistic moments and a contemporary architectural and sculptural vision. His works are intensive and do not take into account conventional frameworks of significance, surpassing genres, but expressing a futuristic and at the same time archeological vision on materiality, movement and spatial definition.

Hironari Kubota is widely exhibited around the world and has participated in various shows and residencies. The performance/architecture that has been shown almost all over the world is his spinning car. This time he will spin a big Buddha Sculpture, evoking the Buddha with 1000 hands, the Kannon Bodhisattva at the Sanjusangen-do Temple in Kyoto. After his two performances, the sculpture will remain exhibited in the garden, as a sculpture-architecture.

Subtle Construction issued also a theoretical book issued by Bypass and devoted to the virtual and the imaginary in architecture, which benefits of the contribution of Luis Santiago Baptista, Sancho Silva, Manuel Aires Mateus, Carlos Bunga, Joao Silverio, Pedro Gadanho, Sinta Werner, Dana Bentia, Matias Machado, Garrett Ricciardi and Julian Rose , Yukihiro Taguchi, Cristian Rusu, Hironari Kubota.

Sponsors and Partnerships:

The Japan Foundation, Camera de Lisboa, Goethe Institute, Romanian Cultural Institute, Museu Colecção Berardo, Plastimar, Largo Residencias, Gamut, Turismo Lisboa, Embaixada da Argentina, Transboavista, Sobreira & Serras, Plataforma Revolver, Arta

Texts in Portuguese