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Press text KALEIDOSCOPE-Current Account by Nav Haq
... This great potential of the future unknown can also have an intoxicating visual effect – particularly when it comes to the creation of desires and lifestyles. Katleen Vermeir & Ronny Heiremans have developed a long-term collaborative project titled A.I.R (short fot Artist-in-Residence), in reference to the advent of artist residencies in post-industrial buildings in 1960s New York. A.I.R considers the ideology of architecture and its imagery. Through their works, they render architecture as a space of constructs for the projection of desires. Working reflexively, they use their own home, an apartment in a post-industrial building in Brussels, as source material, producing representations of their domestic space through what they term “mediated extensions”, which reflect the media landscape by using formats such as magazines, television, and exhibitions. Their most recent project, the film The Good Life (a guided tour) (2009), considers how “strategic foresight” has become part of the socio-economic plan for art institutions in the twenty-first century, locating these institutions as central in the regeneration of cities. The Good Life imagines a guided tour around a fictional art institution that has decided to sell off its building in order for it to be transformed into luxury apartments. The “neutrality” of the gallery space allows it to be transformed into a real estate opportunity. The real estate agent guiding the tour adopts a verbal style that veils any overt notion of gentrification, while conjuring up impressions of aspiration and opulence – a lifestyle fantasy projected onto an empty shell. Incorporating high-gloss brochures and a maquette of the extraordinary building designed by the renowned architecture office 51N4E, The Good Life adopts an approach that critically “over-identifies” with its subject matter to the point of adopting all its rhetorical foms. The Keynesian thesis of pumping steroids into the demand is taken to a near-delusional aesthetic plane through generating unattainable desires for the individual.
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Nav Haq was curator at Arnolfini, Bristol and is now curator at Muhka, Antwerp
