Consider the blog to be in catch up mode while all the fun things we’re doing here in jolly old Londontown get added. Updates will be in a haphazard order, but bear with us. Let’s take a look at some cultural fun we partook of about a month ago. Obviously London is chock full of some amazing art, being the capital city of a country with many years of history. However, we chose, on that weekend, to check out a modern art exhibition in the Hayward gallery in the Southbank centre. It’s a section of the south Thames near Waterloo that has been redone as a lot of cultural venues, like museums, theatres, music venues and a long walk along the river of public space for people to enjoy. The Hayward is a particularly severe piece of modern architecture, but I personally enjoyed it’s look.

In the Hayward (until the end of August) is an exhibition called “Pyscho Buildings“. A number of artists were commissioned to come up with various spaces in their own creative ways. Some did smaller scales of larger architecture in unique situations (like a very very large dollhouse version of his apartment block in the US being struck by replica of his old home in Korea. Others were large-scales spaces to explore or take in. For example, a group of artists purchased a number of IKEA “showrooms” (as in they bought all the pieces in a sample room) and then tore much of the pieces apart. The pieces were then put together in a way to give the impression that something had ravaged the house and you were seeing it just as it happened in suspended animation.

It being an art show, they get kind of anal about people taking photos, so it was hard to capture. But one of the more popular ones (there was a line as only 4 people at a time could enjoy it), was by an “Anarchist” art German art collective (it was the most orderly and organized exhibit) who took one of the exterior terraces and built a gigantic pool on it and built some rowboats for people to go out in the pool on. Here are Carolyn and I with the London Eye in the background.

It was a great way to spend at least a few minutes taking in the city from a unique perspective.

Some other exhibits: a gigantic globe being held together using air pressure, a movie theatre that seemed like an homage to David Lynch, the staircase to the artists landlords apartment done in extreme detail made out of sewn silk (and could be folded into a bag), hundreds of dollhouses lit up and placed in a community of sorts, a 100 ft long tunnel made out of aluminum, a room created out of chicken wire and fragile paper, a room that looked like it had been attacked by some sort of unknown creature and a cave like room made out of some sort of woven material. All in all, it created a wonderful series of art pieces. I found the sewn staircase to be the most impressive from aesthetic standpoint. The destroyed apartment dollhouse and the IKEA destruction were also quite impressive. The above links are photos from the Guardian. If you want a visual representation, they show most of them. It was good fun. Carolyn, Dina and I went. Adrian was lame and had to take some class, but we met up with him after and wandered the Thames for a bit before making our way north past Arsenal where we saw all the folks going to the first of a two night Bruce Springsteen concert and had some good Mexican food. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday! 🙂

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 28th, 2008 at 3:22 pm and is filed under Life Abroad, London. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.