ALL DESIGN
Thursday 27th September 6 - 9pm
with Geopolitical banana-wharf cocktails
exhibition Friday 28th September till Sunday 14th October 2012
Open from Thursday to Saturday 1 – 5pm, Sunday 1 – 4pm
EXHIBITING
Palwasha Amanullah, Nadia Barhoum, Remco de Blaaij,
Eva Dietrich, Daniel Fernández Pascual, Blake Fisher,
Mirko Gatti, Janet Hall, Samir Harb, Irmelin Joelson, Heejung
Kim, Steffen Kraemer, Hannah Meszaros Martin, Chris Molinski,
Corinne Quin, Alan Yates
CURATING
Louise Ashcroft and Helene Kazan
The group assembles along a narrow balcony overlooking South
Quay waterfront in Canary Wharf. A suited man awkwardly
pushes past, mumbling an apology as he makes his way through
this gathering. In close proximity, an LED sign with live share
prices moves across a building boldly asserting ‘Information in the
right hands leads to amazing things. That’s the Knowledge Effect’.
Attempting to negotiate a small stretch of water - evidence of the
Quay’s industrial past - one member of the group is precariously
perched on a ladder trying to reach the old sign on the front of
the building. Their intention is to intervene and cancel out its
alliterated past so that ‘Kall Kwik business and design’ now reveals
itself as ‘all design’.
This act of public redaction forms the title of the exhibition - a
semiotic readymade, an architectural cut-up, and an aesthetic
proposition. ‘all design’ brings the sixteen diverse spatial practices
emerging from this year’s MA programme at the Centre for
Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University together into a
space of productive interplay.
Formed around the Centre’s methodological practice-based
approach to research, the works take architecture as a point of
departure and turn it into a mode of analysis and investigation.
Collectively the projects reverse-engineer the making of space
in order to interrogate and identify the political trajectories of
matter and institutional protocols.
Situated in the financial heart of the city, this context provides
more than just a backdrop to the exhibition, as the capital
flows that move through this space are rematerialized into
zones of exclusion and estrangement. Space is not simply
a location, but a field of forces that push and pull at all the
projects presented here. Tensions emerge that reveal moments
of slippage, confusion, rupture, violence, and subterfuge; that
reveal material erosion, breakage, contamination and ruin. But
unlike the movement of electronic capital that carves clean new
jurisdictions out of networked pixels, these works inhabit and
trouble the margins of existing jurisdictions by settling on top
of melting glaciers, moving into dense jungle, occupying the
stairs of St Paul’s Cathedral, dwelling in a German mountain
cave, entering the bread ovens of Cairo, and even probing
the molecules of air and water that make up our planetary
ecologies. ‘all design’ offers sixteen unique perspectives and
interpretations of a collective set of global points and flows.
With thanks to the support of the Centre for Research Architecture
including Adrian Lahoud, Andy Lowe, John Palmesino,
Susan Schuppli, Paulo Tavares and Eyal Weizman.
