Contents: 31 Tiensevest

admin — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 11:25:08 +0000

Sub-Title

Installation and CD Rom

a collaboration with Bert de Leenheer & Dirk Vanhecke

End Date

Start Date

1 May 1997

Location

Gallery Transit, Leuven Belgium

Body

We were invited by Gallery Transit to make a project for the 1996 opening of their new gallery space.

In 1994 the gallery relocated in a beautiful Art Nouveau inspired town house. The only previous occupants, the owners, had stored throughout the house all their belongings, clothes and furniture. Transit moved all their accumulated possessions, as well as the gallery, into the building. They decided to leave only the salon, the physical core of the house free of domestic objects, painted white as the exhibition space.

Two pairs of lives at either end of the century have been laid over one another, the similarities and differences can be found in the stored chaos of material possessions.

With every room of the house nearly full, the conventional classification of things has collapsed. Paintings are stacked on top of furniture, souvenirs mix with food, clothes merge with packed libraries; whose, when, and where, are difficult questions even for the occupants to answer. Into this extraordinary situation we came to work. What began as a photographic inventory -following the logic of Lost Property - gradually disintegrated. However tempting, it seemed dishonest to introduce a stranger's order - to put words into people's mouths - into the complexity of this material entanglement.

What evolved were 148 images and sound, presented in a form of a slide show viewable from the living room of 31 Tiensevest during the duration of the exhibition.

We produced a limited edition CD rom as a catalogue of the project, it contains all the images and features a soundtrack specially composed by the Bammer Project.

Contents:31 Tiensevest was included as part of Material Culture at the Hayward Gallery, London 1998.

In 2007 we made a new yet related project for Transit entitled ArtLife

Lost Property

admin — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 21:31:16 +0000

Sub-Title

Date of Publication

October 1996

Location

Publisher

Chance Books & Public Art Development Trust; London

Designer

Stephen Coates

Body

A book resulting from a collaboration between us, the London Underground and Public Art Development Trust. It represents a selection of things from one days property recovered by the London Transport Lost Property Office.

We are easily seduced into acquiring, exchanging and displaying vast quantities of material things. Accumulation, in its broadest sense, is the literal writing-into-being of an individual or culture.

Things are found, polished, displayed and treasured; bought, bound or framed and collected; the object, plucked from the generic soup of a media culture, is momentarily arrested and woven into an intimate personal narrative, "I bought this when I was in Paris". It is this enveloping which marks the thing as a possession and simultaneously allows the narrator to refine and evaluate experience, to evolve a sense of difference or belonging. The thing itself, as commodity, inheritance, gift or souvenir, has become a privileged vehicle for establishing an emotional and intellectual identity. Things authenticate experience.

This much is well known.

The dark shadow within our seamless assembly of possessions and continuous narration of `self`, is loss. The word loss delineates a terrifying space, it is the void over which all exchange and collection precariously take place, but, from which no insurance or story can ever protect. Loss infuses accumulation with fear, everything, even our most precious belongings continuously circulate within its grasp.

Lost Property touches the wound opened between lost property, and the emotional investment implicit in personal possession. There will be no attempt to suture that gap. Comprised of photographs and texts, the book mimics the dispassionate style of a museum catalogue in an effort to re-inscribe the absence all the more emphatically. Inevitably, the book has more to do with the conventions of representation, than recovering a material presence. The things pictured, are still missing from these pages.

A temporary collection bound by this catalogue parodies the conventions established by museum acquisition. Although the collection is a well known paradigm of perfection, the objects here are always already incomplete, misplaced, fallen from narration, and never to return.

Lost Property is a selection from one days property recovered by the London Transport Lost Property Office; on average, some three hundred items. Designed as a desirable pocket size souvenir by Stephen Coates, Lost Property was released at the moment of spectacular accumulation, Christmas 1995

Description

148 pages, 140 B & W images

ISBN/ASIN

0-9513932-4-3

inventory

Contents: 31 Tiensevest

Sub-Title

End Date

Start Date

Location

Body

Related Films

Related Projects

Related Publications

Lost Property

Sub-Title

Date of Publication

Location

Publisher

Designer

Body

Description

ISBN/ASIN

ArtWords Link

Related Films

Related Projects

Related Publications