Exhibition: 'Images of Desire' (FFAR, Dec 11–18)

IMAGES OF DESIRE

Architecture’s relation to the image has shifted radically in recent years, and the expanded role occupied by the (rendered) image presents enormous ethical, practical, and political implications for the architectural discipline. This exhibition shows the work of students from the KTH School of Architecture, who have been given the (impossible) task of diving the norms at work in contemporary visualization and devising “a norm-critical architectural image.”

Under present modes of “distributed,” “cognitive,” “neoliberal,” or “late” capitalism, we argue, housing has become a real-estate infrastructure and a spatial product that is largely regulated by the internal procurement protocols of large-scale construction firms and the desire-inducing strategies of marketing agencies. Much of the traditional graphic communication associated with architectural labor has been turned into marketing material: plans are reproduced in coffee-table books, photographs of architects at work are used in advertisements. The rendered image of a building now actively manages both the design process and occupancy: as the primary product sold to the consumer buying “off the plan,” space is experienced an image, before and even after occupancy, as residents scramble to bring gentrified fictions to life via their daily routines and presentation of self.

The theoretical lenses of feminist scholarship and critical theory are, we believe, useful in understanding this shift, in exposing the power of the gaze; the links exploring the relations between subjectivity, sexuality, and space; theorizing “desire” in a host of ways; and exposing the power of performative repetition in reproducing societal norms, inscribed upon gendered bodies. Besides reading and lectures, we have also engaged in a series of critical Photoshop/rendering/writing workshops  to go behind the scenes of image production.

Welcome to the exhibition opening at FFAR, Dec 11 6pm . It is accompanied by a public lecture, “Architecture’s Image Problem,” which will be delivered by Helen Runting (Urban planner and urban designer and PhD student in ) and Rutger Sjögrim (architect and teacher at the KTH School of Architecture).