REDCAT presents Pablo Bronstein: Enlightenment Discourses on the Origins of Architecture on view January 24–March 15, 2014.
The work of Pablo Bronstein is distinguished by a series of projects and public interventions in which, assuming the role of art historian, architect and choreographer, the artist reconstructs historical moments and mimics them in tableau vivants. Camouflaged within the guise of history and imitating (at least in appearance) architectural forms or urban lifestyles from a certain era, Bronstein reinvents the past with great subtlety, highlighting the uncertainty of its construction and revealing its multi-layer composition.
The newly commissioned project that Pablo Bronstein has carried out for REDCAT functions as a “staged essay” where the artist articulates, by means of a series of drawings and furniture, the origins of architecture from the naturalistic perspective of the Enlightenment. In a certain way, Bronstein satirizes the insistence with which Enlightenment architectural culture sought in its origins, and how they guaranteed a “nature” uncontaminated by historical events.
The inherent contradictions that Pablo Bronstein establishes between the drawings and furniture/buildings, the shapes they refer to, their irreducibility to pure theory or mere physicality, functionality or artifice, are also ironic comments about the role of art historians, highlighting the pleasure but also the danger of historical discourse. Pablo Bronstein establishes processes that enable fissures between the past and present, the human and inanimate and, above all, between the practice of history and lived experience. He also questions the common ground between the construction of discourse and the subject of study, as well as our own body and the way we look through objects, involuntarily searching for their capacity to reveal to us a history. As in any historical discourse, in the end Pablo Bronstein creates a temporary, incomplete setting, one that can always change shape, demonstrating to us that there is no single origin and that the original always seems to be preceded by its copy.
Pablo Bronstein (b. 1977, Buenos Aires) works in London. Solo shows include Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2013); Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2011); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2011); Sculpture Court, Tate Britain, London (2010); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009); and Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich (2007).
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