Curated as part of This Land Is Your Land, this two week project was curated by Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Lawrence Abu Hamdan.
Participants include: Hiraku Kitai, Angela Melitopoulos, MdeG, Lorenzo Pezzani, Eyal Sivan, Oliver Rees, Paulo Tavares, Eyal Weizman Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College.
Model Court is a two-week inhabitation of CCA 1 as a model of a courtroom. The point of departure is the work of the architect Hiraku Kitai of Group O Architecture, currently working on a World Bank sponsored commission for a manual for courtroom designs for ‘developing countries’. Kitai’s work deals with the court as a legal technology in which new forms of ‘justice’ and the legal status of ‘truths’ are established via a host of new technologies of representation, through the visual performance of bodies in space and through the aural affect of voice. Her project thus occupies the ambivalent ground between a search for innovative forms of transparency and imposed forms of justice.
The design of the exhibition is a work by Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, in discussion with Hiraku Kitai. In it, the legal technologies of representation and the protocol of spatial/legal practice are used to display a series of video, sound, written works and talks developed by other practitioners from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College. The work deals with the object of jurisprudence, evidence and the hidden apparatuses that become the essential constituents of tribunals – the typist, the translator, the illustrator and the media technologies that enable the public dissemination of verdicts. The room itself becomes a space in contestation, one that seeks to develop a line of debate around the way in which the legal context challenges the way we see objects, models, films and other forms of production.
The project thus aims to create a translation of spaces, to open a discourse between the gallery and the court, in which a trade of rhetorical devices and patterns of representations are constructed, allowing the exhibited model to become a site of new forms of inspection, a different kind of social terrain and spatial order.
BIOGRAPHIES
Centre for Research Architecture: Paradoxically perhaps, the Centre for Research Architecture sets out to question the two separate terms that make up its given title. It seeks to open up the discipline and praxis of 'architecture' – understood as the production of rarefied buildings and urban structures – into shifting network of 'spatial practices' that includes various other forms of intervention. It contests as well the utilitarian, applied, means-to-ends relation between knowledge and action that is evoked by the term 'research' and the artificial opposition between theory and practice it implies. Drawing on the vocabularies of urbanism, architecture, art, media, politics and philosophy the centre’s mode of operation seeks to use spatial practices for an open ended form of critical inquiry. The centre has brought together a group of leading international practitioners – architects, artists, activists, urbanists, filmmakers and curators – to work collectively in a roundtable mode on individual projects. This network of global practitioners engage in a unique and robust set of critical interventions in the fields of spatial and cultural politics; they look for enhanced political impact using critical theory and aesthetics strategies.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an Artist based in London, he studied at Middlesex University and is currently developing work at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Abu Hamdan’s work is chiefly concerned with sound, the voice and its spatial performance in relation to urbanity. These ideas are developed using a compilation of processes including performance, film, writing, cartography, illustration and shoe making which are often gathered to achieve alternative readings the built environment. His practice is characterized by the long term project Marches which has been in development since 2005, the project was performed and exhibited for multiple organizations including Transmission Gallery Glasgow, C-E-M Lisbon, Artangel interaction London, No.w.here lab London and in Italy with Festival di Santarcangelo 2009. Abu Hamdan is part of the group that inhabit and run the arts and events space at 113 Dalston lane in London.
Sidsel Meineche Hansen is a Danish Born artist based in London. She studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and the Staedelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Towards a New Authenticity, is the working title of an ongoing series of works, under which she is investigating the role of models (architectural, scientific, conceptual model and diagrams) as a tools in designing or translating the relations between a material and an immaterial culture. Since 2007 this has led to works that, deriving from practice led conversations, presents them selves as printed matter, or as objects /models for a production that again takes the form as conversation and public lectures. Most recently: The Generic Stone 2009. An Exhibition and a lecture held at Hordaland Art Centre. Bergen. Sidsel Meineche is currently pursuing a Masters at Goldsmiths College in London, at the Centre for Research Architecture.
Eyal Weizman is an Architect and director of Goldsmiths' Centre for Research Architecture. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London and completed his PhD at the London Consortium, Birkbeck College. Since 2008 he is a member of B'Tselem managing board, and is a founding member of the Bethlehem based architectural collective, Decolonizing Architecture. Weizman has taught, lectured, curated and organised conferences in many institutions worldwide. His books include Hollow Land [Verso Books, 2007], A Civilian Occupation [Verso Books, 2003], the series Territories 1,2 and 3, Yellow Rhythms and many articles in journals, magazines and edited books. Weizman is a regular contributors to many journals and magazines. He is an editor at large for Cabinet Magazine (New York). Weizman is the recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture Prize for 2006-2007
Image: Eyal Weizman, The Best of all Possible Walls (drawing by christine cornell), 2008
