To Bring Down

14 April 2008
To Bring Down A House - Build Around - Tim Etchells

To Bring Down A House - Gas - Tim Etchells

Vlatka and I are showing our collaboration To Bring Down a House at Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Beirut, from April 12th – May 31st. It’s a part HOME WORKS IV: A FORUM ON CULTURAL PRACTICES which includes exhibitions, lectures, panels, dance, performances, film and video screenings, and publications. Sfeir-Semler is open 11am – 7pm. Closes on Sundays and Mondays.

Starting as an almost bare space, the room for To Bring Down a House is slowly growing into an unruly archive of proposals – some simple and enactable; others more far-fetched, absurd and playful – all suggesting different ways to destroy, attack, or otherwise ‘bring down’ a house; ways of destroying it, hauting it, making it unhomely. As an installation the piece is ‘performed’ or animated from a distance, as Vlatka (from New York) and me (from Sheffield, Vienna, Essen etc according to my ludicrous travel schedule) continually send new material by fax and email to be added to the work. The installation changes daily as more than a hundred collages, drawings, instructions and texts are added over the course of the exhibition, pinned to the walls by gallery staff. A couple of the new collages I’ve done are included above. I’m really liking a certain scrappy devil-may-care photoshop approach – more an attitude than a techique! I love the scraps of random background/noise copy-pasted by accident and repeated/left in place in the second image for example.

To Bring Down a House in Beirut is a new incarnation of the project originally created for the Protections exhibition in Kunsthaus Graz, fall 2006.

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Coming soon. Jim Fletcher and I are heading to Vienna on Saturday where we present the work-in-progress/monologue piece Sight is the Sense that Dying People Tend to Lose First. Performance is at TQW/Halle G on Saturday night at 20.30. The performance is preceded by a video screening I’ve organised including great work from Vlatka, Jakup Ferri, Neil Goldberg, Mladen Stilinovic, Ivan Moudov and Anna Witt.