076 EXHIBITION A cornerstone of the exhibition is Maria


Taniguchi’s Mies 421 (2010), a short black- and-white film constructed from still images of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion – a building designed for the German section of the 1929 International Exposition. Taniguchi’s lens settles on various details of the iconic structure, recording its horizontal and vertical planes, marble and onyx walls, chrome-plated columns and tinted glass. As each new image appears on screen, we hear the loud click of a metronome; a sense of tension and anticipation starts to build, as if something sinister is about to be unleashed. For the Filipina artist, who describes the work as a ‘horror film’, the building represents a ground zero of architectural modernism, a progenitor of questionable offspring. But Mies’ original structure was only intended to exist temporarily and, in fact, was torn down in 1930, not even a year after its completion. Te building we see today is the controversial 1980s reconstruction, built using historical drawings and the original’s rediscovered footings. It is, in essence, a doppelganger, an uncanny double that, in Paul Goldberger’s words ‘is not supposed to exist’. Te notion of the double was central to Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay Te Uncanny, in which he describes a strange feeling ‘that undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible – to all that arouses dread and creeping horror’. Uncanny doubles are prevalent in cinematic horror: terrifying reflections, sinister shadows, creepy clones and troubling twins. A prime example of the latter is found in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel Te Shining (1977), in which an eerie hotel is haunted by murder victims – doubles whose number include the terrifying Grady girls with their matching powder blue dresses and vacant stares. In his article, ‘Mies Van Der Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries,’


Robin Evans refers to the original Barcelona Pavilion as a ‘phantom’, a building whose reputation was based on a few grainy black- and-white photographs. Abandoned and damaged, it became what Rem Koolhaas describes as ‘the first modern ruin’. In Taniguchi’s film, the resurrected pavilion is haunted by a sense of unease. Even the raised arms of Georg Kolbe’s slightly larger-than-life bronze statue, Dawn – placed by Mies at one end of a shallow pool in the pavilion – seem to be shielding the figure from some sort of horror.


‘I’ve always been a fan of J G Ballard’s literature, especially works like High-Rise and Concrete Island,’ says Pocock. ‘So much of


what we refer to as Ballardian – dystopian modernity and the psychological effects of social environments – come from what he was seeing in postwar Britain as this monstrous iteration of early modernism.’ Te tower blocks that were built in cities in the United Kingdom after the Second World War symbolised an extraordinary period of optimism and determination to use architecture to transform society. Te reality, however, was that these high-density housing projects, promoted as utopian ‘streets in the sky,’ became cold, imposing and dehumanising environments that attracted crime and fostered social isolation. In Ballard’s High-Rise, which was turned into a


Below Amba Sayal-Bennett Carus (2020).


Powder coated mild steel, chemiwood, MDF, resin, velvet, magnets, 133 x 43 x 64cm.


Courtesy the artist


Right Richard Hughes If Socks Aren’t Pulled Up Heads Will Roll (2009). Glass reinforced polyester, iron powder, polyurethane and acrylic, 301 x 62.5 x 28 cm. Courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow. Photo credit: Nils Stærk


Far right Ola Hassanain The Line That Follows (2022) An Early Road Before a Modern One (2022)


Installation still from Hassanain’s studio


at the Rijksakademie. 4K video with archival footage montage, duration 11:52 minutes. Beech wood embroidery hoop with black and white print on fabric, 150 x 200cm. Courtesy of the artist. Photo credit: Sander van Wettum


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