EXHIBITION 079
landscapes on communities include the enigmatic filmmaker NT, whose short film BRUTAL (2022) was shot at night in Druids Heath and Aston New Town in Birmingham’s inner city housing estates. Elsewhere, paintings and drawings by Firenze Lai, showing figures corralled and stifled by their surroundings, meditate on the alienating concrete urbanism of her native Hong Kong. ‘In many ways, the artists in the exhibition evoke the very real violence and horrors of modernism: its social violence, political instrumentalisation, colonial and neo-colonial roots,’ Pocock explains. ‘Yet they also evoke its fictions – how images and films drawing on modernist architecture have stigmatised it.’
A striking example is Espace vaincu, Énergie contrôlée (2022) by French artist Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann. Tis playful yet sinister installation transforms a 6m-wide niche within the gallery into a domestic interior, disrupting the building’s neo-Gothic features. Featuring a suspended metal staircase and a faux marble, tomb-like sculpture, the mise-en- scène evokes the modernist interiors of horror films where female protagonists are subject to male violence or, as in Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995), fall victim to an environmental illness, possibly caused by a recently renovated home. Te domestic realm as a place of threat is a theme of Ho Tzu Nyen’s haunting film Te Cloud of Unknowing (2011), in which different
Left Kihlberg & Henry Slow Violence (2019) HD video, colour, stereo sound, film still. Courtesy of the artists
Below Seher Shah Unit Object (gate) (2014) Etching, 53 x 62.5cm, edition of 20.
Courtesy of the artist and Glasgow Print Studio
characters living in a decaying Singaporean housing block encounter a mysterious ethereal cloud, culminating in terrifying confrontations with hair-raising spectres. While many works in this exhibition probe the role of the artistic imaginary, Abbas Zahedi responds to a very real horror: the tragic Grenfell Tower fire of 2017, which killed 72 people – including one of the artist’s friends. ‘You can literally think of that event as a horror in a modernist block,’ says Pocock of the tragedy, which was the worst residential fire in the United Kingdom since the Second World War, the severity of which was attributed to the combustible exterior cladding that had been recklessly installed as a cost- cutting measure. Zahedi’s series Exit Signs (2020–ongoing), is a personal reflection on the Grenfell fire, responding specifically to the Conservative politician Jacob Rees-Mogg’s comments that if he had been there that night, he would have used ‘common-sense’ and exited the block. Riffing on the illuminated fire exit signs seen in public and residential buildings, Zahedi subverts their familiar green and white designs or replaces them with alternative motifs, transforming the spaces in which they are installed into places of reflection and even mourning. ‘We have collaborated with Zahedi on a bespoke Exit Sign for the exhibition,’ explains Pocock. ‘It alludes to a very real trauma, which I think is important to include. Buildings like Grenfell Tower occupy our environment, we live in them and inhabit them, they have a certain agency through architects and planners. I realise works like this are a provocation, but it is very important to have that dialogue.’ As Zahedi’s subtle yet powerful work suggests, at the heart of ‘Horror in the Modernist Block’ is a consideration of the psychological and emotional impact of modernist architecture on the people who live with it and in it. As much as the show is an exhilarating journey through the creepy, the uncanny and the unsetting, it is undoubtedly also a call to empathy.
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