074 EXHIBITION
WHEN IT comes to thinking about the relationship between architecture and horror, the trope of the Victorian haunted house is a familiar, if tired, cliché: a turreted neo-Gothic profile set against a stormy sky, replete with flying bats and lightning flashes. We think, perhaps, of the sinister Bates mansion from Hitchcock’s Psycho, or the kooky Addams Family home from Charles Addams’ New Yorker cartoons and classic TV series. Yet modern architecture, for all its progressivist and utopian claims, is also closely associated with the horror genre. Alienating tower blocks and concrete jungles have provided the backdrop to many nightmarish dystopias in 20th century literature and cinema. Stanley Kubrick, for instance, made the link in his 1971 film adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), setting the violent story amid the Brutalist aesthetic of London’s Tamesmead Estate. Te author, J G Ballard similarly saw architectural modernism as a haunting presence; its postwar structures becoming a channel for violence and social regression in hard-hitting works such as High- Rise (1975).
Te notion of modernist buildings as sites of dread underpins the exhibition ‘Horror in the Modernist Block’ at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery, based in the Victorian grade II-listed former Oozells Street School, converted by Levitt Bernstein Architects in 1997. Curated by Melanie Pocock, the show presents work by 20 UK and international contemporary artists that explores the relationship between horror and architectural modernism, examining the troubled history, impact and ambiguous legacies of modernist buildings. For some
people, such structures are architectural icons to be celebrated. To others, they are relics of failed utopian projects that haunt the present. In some parts of the world, this architectural style elicits fear and disquiet because of its links to dictatorial regimes. Take the Philippines, for instance, where buildings such as the National Arts Centre in Laguna and the Cultural Centre of the Philippines in Manila were commissioned by Imelda Marcos, the wife of brutal dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the country from 1965 to 1986 in a violent, authoritarian regime. One of the exhibition’s catalysts, says Pocock, was the experience of walking through Birmingham during the first Covid lockdown. ‘It was in those times, of walking alone in the city, that I was reminded how important the Brutalist architecture is here,’ she recalls. ‘But, because the city centre was empty of people, it took on quite a ghostly presence, and that got me thinking about this relationship between modernism and horror.’ Pocock wanted to explore the theme through the lens of contemporary art, as opposed to architectural projects ‘because of the way artists engage with buildings and spaces aesthetically’. To that end, ‘Horror in the Modernist Block’ explores architectural modernism’s affective legacy. An eerie journey awaits visitors to Ikon, where film, photography, sculpture, installation, painting and works on paper link the tropes of the horror genre (suspense, darkness, fear) with the conditions and vocabulary of modernist architecture, revealing how such buildings not only influence the way we live, but how they can also shape our deepest fears.
Right Shezad Dawood The Directorate (2019). Tapestry in teak artist’s frame, wallpaper, frame: 159 x 116 cm.
Courtesy of the artist, Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai and Timothy Taylor, London. Photo credit: Sharjah Art Foundation
Below Firenze Lai Union (2022).
Watercolour and gouache on paper, 31 × 41 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space
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