6.30–8.30pm
Admission Free
SUPPORT STRUCTURES
Author / Editor: Celine Condorelli
Produced by: Support Structure (Celine Condorelli & Gavin Wade)
Published by: Sternberg Press, Berlin, New York (2009)
Download Support Structures Card Part 1
Download Support Structures Card Part 2
Support Structures is a manual for what bears, sustains, props, and holds up. It is a manual for those things that encourage, give comfort, approval, and solace; that care for and provide consolation and the necessities of life. It is a manual for that which assists corroborates, advocates, articulates, substantiates, champions, and endorses; for what stands behind, underpins, frames, presents, maintains, and strengthens. Support Structures is a manual for those things that give, in short, support. While the work of supporting might traditionally appear as subsequent, unessential, and lacking value in itself, this manual is an attempt to restore attention to one of the neglected, yet crucial modes through which we apprehend and shape the world.
Support Structures is a publication project for the creation of the missing bibliography of support structures. A long-term engagement with notions of support, through the collaborative 'Support Structure' Project between Architect Celine Condorelli and Artist-Curator Gavin Wade, highlights an almost complete absence of literature or theory on the subject, and therefore the imperative need to support its creation. Support Structures offers support through potential methodologies, inspirations, and activations for practice. While registering and collecting reference projects in a new archive of support structures alongside its ten-phase project, different writers, thinkers, and practitioners were invited from various fields to elaborate on frameworks and work on texts, which form the theoretical backbone of the publication.
Support Structures is intended as a users manual, investigating notions of support within a realm of art, architecture and other spatial practices. A collection of contributions offers different possibilities for engaging in this unchartered territory, from theoretical frameworks to projects, existing systems to ones invented for specific creative processes. Support Structures offers support through potential methodologies, inspirations and activations for practice, and addresses important questions for art and architecture practices on forms of display, organization, articulation, appropriation, autonomy, and temporariness, and the manifestations of blindness towards them
Contributors include:
Essays by: Celine Condorelli, Mark cousins, Jaime Stapleton, Andrea Phillips, Bart de Baere, Wouter Davidts, Eyal Weizman & Rony Brauman, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Jan Verwoert.
With works by:
Cory Arcangel, Artist Placement Group, Can Altay, Conrad Atkinson, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Banu Cennetoglu, Christopher DArcangelo, Martin Beck, Cevdet Erek, Andrea Fraser, Ryan Gander, Ella Gibbs, Frederick Kiesler, Lucy Kimbell, James Langdon, El Lissitzky, Peter Nadin, The offices of Peter Fend, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Jenny Holzer, Peter Nadin, Richard Prince & Robin Winters, Gordon Matta-Clark, Antoni Muntadas, Lilly Reich, Support Structure, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lawrence Weiner, Christopher Williams, Carey Young, a.o.
The book launch will be accompanied by an introduction to Barter with the Future Self, by members of Åbäke Design Collective and a special viewing of the Design Real exhibition with staff from the Serpentine to discuss the Education Programme.
Design Real Seminars
Celine Condorelli
Saturday 30 January, 3pm, free
This autumn, prominent artists, curators and academics discuss themes connected to the exhibition Design Real in the Design Real Seminars. Design Real is curated by the renowned industrial designer Konstantin Grcic and the exhibition is designed in collaboration with Alex Rich and Jürg Lehni. It is the Serpentine Gallery’s first exhibition devoted to contemporary design. Grcic’s selection for the exhibition focuses on ‘real’ items: mass-produced items that have a practical function in everyday life. The exhibition presents a wide range of products with different styles and functions, from furniture and household products to technical and industrial innovations.
The Serpentine’s central gallery features a research space expanding on themes developed in Design Real. A dedicated internet site, www.design-real.com, designed by Alex Rich and Jürg Lehni, is the exhibition’s central resource and an integral part of its concept. The site investigates the objects in the exhibition in detail, exploring aspects of their development, production and use. Visitors to Design Real can access the site in the exhibition’s research space, which is also the setting for this series of free public Seminars by prominent designers, curators and critics.
Future Design Seminars include:
Markus Miessen
Saturday 6 February 3pm, Free
Miessen is an architect, writer and a participant in the Serpentine Project Skills Exchange. His Berlin-based studio is currently working on projects for clients including the European Union’s Institute for Culture and the Government of Slovenia.
Barter with the Future Self
Åbäke and the Staff and Residents of Westmead Care Home, with instructions by Markus Miessen
21 January — 7 February 2010
Sackler Centre for Arts Education
Open Daily 10-6PM
As part of Serpentine Gallery’s ongoing Skills Exchange project, architect Markus Miessen, design collective Åbäke and the staff and residents of Westmead Care Home in Westminster present a series of propositions at Serpentine Gallery. Over two weeks, they begin a process aimed at altering social dynamics that separate older people, the ‘art world’ and other social sectors.
Taking the title of the project Skills Exchange literally, over two weeks a series of exchanges are taking place. Furniture and artwork from Westmead seen in the Serpentine Gallery’s Process Room has been ‘swapped’ with limited edition prints from the Serpentine Gallery. Staff at the Serpentine Gallery will tour the limited editions at Westmead and staff and residents from the Care Home will share their ideas about the future with groups at the gallery through a series of Skype conversations. A cake-making workshop and birthday celebration will bring staff from both institutions together.
The installation is a starting point for discussion of future possibilities and collaborations between artists, designers and Westmead. To enable participating artists and creative workers to imagine themselves in relation to the elderly care of the future, portraits of the team involved in the project have been aged 40 years by Kees de Klein & Åbäke. These provide context for a Family Day in which people of all ages are invited to visualise and imagine their future selves on a timeline from 1960 to 2060.
Serpentine Family Day
Saturday 6 February 12 – 5pm
Barter with the Future Self is part of the ongoing Serpentine Gallery Project Skills Exchange: Urban Transformation and the Politics of Care. Through Skills Exchange, artists work in collaboration with elderly people, and a range of local constituents, from market traders to students and care workers exchanging skills and ideas for social and architectural change.
Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens
London W2 3XA
T + 44(0)20 7402 6075
information@serpentinegallery.org
