Exhibition

The Apartment Project is an exhibition taking place in the form of a three-day event from Friday night 11 until Sunday night 13 December 2009 in a private flat on Broadway Market in London E8. The exhibition focuses on time-based media as well as non-mediated experience, thus presenting a number of performances, live events and debates over the course of three days. As such the realm of the object is left behind in order to detach art from its physical experience and to take it into other realms, taking place within the viewer.

As there is only a limited number of possibilities to show art to an audience, existing structures need to be rethought. The Apartment Project is to be seen in this context, as it presents the object-based and non-object based work of a number of recently graduated students in a flexible situation rather than a fixed gallery-like environment. These works do not correspond to the dichotomy between object-led art and non-mediated experience, but rather they balance somewhere in between. There will be installations, prints, videos and drawings as well as in situ works, processes and situations. Some of these interactions are reminiscent of a previous generation of artists graduating in the late ‘80s from Goldsmiths together, the so-called YBA’s, who went on to hold their initial show in an alternative space in the Docklands. A few years in later in 1993, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas opened ‘The Shop’ in Bethnal Green, only a doorstep away from Broadway Market. That same year Rachel Whiteread showed ‘House’, a concrete cast of the inside of a Victorian terraced house at 193 Grove Road, in East London too. As a reply, one of the artists participating in “The Apartment Project” will construct a fantastical dollhouse which will be given to Ms. Whiteread as a present after the exhibition.

The area around Bethnal Green and Hackney has undeniably undergone a huge metamorphosis over the past decade. From seedy quarter to hipster hang-out, Broadway Market stands exemplary for this process of gentrification. Significant changes did not only occur within the physical and architectural realm. Loads has shifted and moved on within the artist’s mind as well, as a new generation of artists has sprung up which doesn’t neatly fit within the boundaries of the generational. Nevertheless a few common properties can be found in the exhibition as a medium for situations and processes, reflecting upon the exhibition format and its scenography. Most of the artists participating are recent graduates from art schools in London (Saint Martins and Chelsea College of Art and Design) and Belgium (HISK and KASK, both in Ghent).

The artists currently participating in the Apartment Project are: Jonas Vansteenkiste, Sven Overheul, Aukje Dekker, Kristian De La Riva, Rinus Van de Velde, Ian Giles, Filip Gilissen, Frederic Van Simaey, Lou Marcellin, Maude Mathieu and Sarah Medvewsky.