Á Droite et à Gauche (Sans Lunettes), [On the Right and on the Left (Without Glasses)],(2016), fans, Dimensions Variable-Corps à Corps, [Head On], (2016), Growing plants, hanging plants, painted steel circular bench, circular hanging planter, Dimensions variable -Wall To Wall,(2016) with John Lely and John Tilbury, Looped audio track, speakers, Dimensions variable
GB11 Commission
Three interconnected works are inserted into the Biennale buildings, both inside and outside, that establish micro-climates and living environments. The sculptural interventions present specific relationships with space and time: a soundtrack, growing plants, a field of oscillating fans. The works can be experienced through being exposed to them, as occurrences of something that is already happening in the space. There is a form of immanent cooperation that connects the works to each other through their biomechanisms, but also to the public, visitors, people, context—without ever excluding, however, the here and now of the unforeseen that can turn each performance into an event.
Recognizing a separate dimension in our current relationship with things, or with art, and a fundamental condition of expropriation, Céline Condorelli’s (b. 1974, Paris/London) works move, grow, and speak in order to restructure our faculty to use space, to build experience, to let things happen. Her works declare their mechanism of appearance, their capacity for transformation, the elements that limit or encourage them, their form, and capacity for change.
For the past decade, Condorelli’s practice has been committed to the continuing exploration of less explicit elements of structures and framing mechanisms through which an individual engages with the world—be they cultural, ecological, material, social, or political—the apparatuses of visibility often taken for granted which she calls “support structures.”
Recent projects such as Display Show (with Gavin Wade and James Langdon, 2015–16), and the artist-run space Eastside Projects (2008–ongoing) focuses on how display is intrinsic to artistic production and interpretation, and on the ways objects are shown, classified, owned, valued, and transformed. Condorelli makes sculptures, displays, and propositions that refer to radical practices of twentieth-century artists, designers, and architects A strand in her practice examines the urgency of creating possibilities for being together and sharing space in a highly fragmented society, through learning or playing, with, for example, the giant curtain work All Our Tomorrows (2016). She recently made two functional merry-go-rounds for “Playgrounds 2016,” at the São Paulo Museum of Art,, and proposed Kunsthalle Lissabon as a model for a playground for her exhibition there, “Concrete Distractions” (2016), both projects further exploring the idea of the museum as a playground. AM
self-presentation:
While studying at the Architectural Association in London, I quickly realized I was much more committed to the conversations that theorist Mark Cousins and architect Cedric Price had in the bar than to designing buildings. Full of questions about how to position myself, I once visited film director Jean-Marie Straub, who gave me precious advice: walk around a place three times and find the strategic point from which you can see something without destroying its mystery. “There is nothing,” he said, “but topography.”
One summer, I went to see Malmö’s Eastern Cemetery, in southern Sweden, and fell in love with the fittings of the Flower Kiosk, designed by Sigurd Lewerentz. Not much more than a shell, it wears everything related to use on its concrete skin: electric wires and lighting fold out like line drawings on the ceiling and walls, doorframes are attached directly onto surfaces and windows are glass panels fixed onto openings. This revealed a path for me that seemed worth following, between necessity and delight.
