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Screening of first installment of Gets Under the Skin: Films and Videos on Modernist Architecture curated by Hajnalka Somogyi

Gets Under the Skin
Apr 24 2009
Apr 30 2009
May 7 2009

With films by:
Bernd Behr, Johanna Billing, Michael Blum, Josef Dabernig, Domènec, Miklós Erhardt, Terence Gower, Pierre Huyghe, Lars Laumann, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Caitlin Masley, Ursula Mayer, Anna Molska, Sadie Murdoch, Pia Rönicke, Anri Sala, Caspar Stracke and Judi Werthein

Modernist architecture has been a strong, recurring theme in contemporary art. Way after its rise and fall, it still seems to bug artists, both as art and as social program: it provokes mixed feelings of fascination, nostalgia, rejection and disillusionment. Gets Under the Skin offers a selection of critical responses to the ideas and products of modernist architecture that neither buy the recent “grand narrative” of its wholesale failure nor join the uncritical celebration and fetishization of its masterpieces.
Taking prime and more obscure examples of the Euro-American modernist architectural canon from the Bauhaus school in Dessau or the Goldfinger House in London through Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation and the Crown Hall at the IIT campus to the Expo ’67 in Montreal and Eastern European housing projects among many others, these works recast various threads that led from the originally informative ideas of pure reason and universal emancipation to the wildly divergent realities and myths that make up for their current context. Demolished and in ruins or polished and musealized, modernist architecture appears in these works as an unshakable legacy that continues to inspire and irritate.
Gets Under the Skin is a thesis project curated by Hajnalka Somogyi as part of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

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