Copenhagen Place is a new non-commercial art space in Limehouse East London. Partly built and created by former Brighton sculpture students, Paul Gwilliam and Jazmine Miles-Long, their first show opens Wednesday of this week and everyone that can make it to London should be in attendance.
Details below:
COPENHAGEN PLACE PRESENTS... CATALINA NICULESCU & RACHAEL CHAMPION
FOR COPENHAGEN PLACE’S INAUGURAL EXHIBITION, Catalina Niculescu and Rachael Champion examine the human potential of our architectural surroundings. Their hopes and fears have the potential to become guiding principles to a space whose identity remains, as yet, wholly uncertain.
NICULESCU’S PRACTICE is marked by a drifting ambiguity of emphasis. Fluctuating between documentation and performance, she responds to her environment with strategic forethought and tactical spontaneity. The result is a series of interferences with urban architecture that are recorded and sparsely edited into suggestive, transferrable events in video and photography.
For the show at Copenhagen Place, Niculescu takes her cues from the folkloric traditions of modernist architecture. The movement’s aspirations for an egalitarian redesign of the cityscape were, in part, guided by a sensitivity to the vernacular history of dwellings. Niculescu lights upon the collected Romanian folk histories of Ion Creanga, finding amongst them allegories for the achievements and absurdities of the modernist project.
Her video, “To the end of the night”, is the result. Whilst one of Creanga’s protagonists tries to fill his home with sunshine using a bucket, Niculescu takes the more radical step of exposing London’s sheltered modernist inner-spaces to a soft, numinous light. Copenhagen Place’s own walls do not escape the glow.
CHAMPION’S REVERENCE FOR THE TRANSFORMATIVE potential of architecture is of a more scientistic nature. Agricultural technology and bioengineering are the carriers of human spirit in her installations, sculptures and architectural interventions. Layering organic matter, construction materials and heavy machinery, Champion describes the intricate overlaps of our physical environment. The complex folly-systems which emerge rub up against our unwavering belief in the products of scientific information.
Here, Champion demands that we delve under the floorboards of Copenhagen Place, engineering a subterranean experience which calls into doubt the space’s surface topography. Tiled and greased abysses threaten the gallery-goer, whilst the structure of the building is drawn into an intimate relationship with a system whose purpose is hidden, mystical and thoroughly suspect.
COPENHAGEN PLACE harnesses these architectural introversions and turns them into an act of brazen self-exposure. Niculescu and Champion allow it, finally, to relieve itself of its virgin modesty.
CURATED BY PAUL GWILLIAM AND MATT DRAGE
PRIVATE VIEW WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 10TH
NEAREST STATIONS: MILE END TUBE, LIMEHOUSE DLR, WESTFERRY DLR BUSES: 277, D6, D3. GET OFF AT PIXLEY ST.
