Louisiana Museum of Modern Art finalizes its exhibition series with architects

The Architect’s Studio: Cave_bureau
The Louisiana Museum of Trendy Artwork
Humlebaek, Denmark
By November 26

About an hour from Copenhagen, The Louisiana Museum of Trendy Artwork hugs the Baltic Sea. This yr, the world-class arts establishment is closing its five-year exhibition collection, The Architect’s Studio, with a sixth and closing present highlighting the work of Nairobi-based Cave_bureau. Cave_bureau’s exhibition follows these of Wang Shu, Tatiana Bilbao, ELEMENTAL, Anupama Kundoo, and Forensic Structure. The design on show is an immersive set up bridging disparate themes of histories of the enslaved, cultural craft, and architectural type making.

Becoming for the studio title, the shape they’ve chosen to anchor the present is a cave, albeit an summary one. The construction, like a theatrical drape with dramatic folds, hovers above the dimly-lit gallery that includes archival supplies, surveys, and research that collectively inform a narrative about Kenya’s current previous, each social and geological. The ephemera are retrieved from Cave_bureau’s ongoing Anthropocene Museum venture, which they first offered on the Venice Structure Biennale in 2021.

Woven from rattan materials, the cave construction stems from the studio’s 3D scans of the Shimoni Collapse jap Kenya, close to the Indian Ocean. These have been recreated at a 1:1 scale in collaboration with The Centre for Data Know-how and Structure on the Royal Danish Academy (CITA). Reaching to the cave, nevertheless, is just attainable although the present’s (un)welcoming set up: a portal-like sculpture titled The Door of No Return. This was the title given to an notorious 18th century construction that served as a middle for the slave commerce on Gorée Island, simply off the coast of Senegal. Manufactured from limestone stalactites, the door serves its perform but in addition encapsulates the trauma—each human and ecological—that the general venture investigates inside. Whereas paying homage to the limestone discovered within the Shimoni Cave, the duo sourced the set up’s materials from the quarries in Faxe, Denmark.

Curator Mette Marie Kallehauge advised AN that Cave_Bureau is “a apply that doesn’t construct in any respect however as an alternative investigates area whereas nonetheless utilizing the instruments of structure. [They] consider in historical past and previous geologies to know the long run—they take a look at how we arrived on the state we’re in now, the Anthropocene, via reverse futurism.”

For Cave_Bureau’s cofounder Kabage Karanja, presenting the present on the Vilhelm Wohlert-designed Louisiana Museum with its deep connections to modernist histories (in addition to an archive representing 50 years of formidable exhibitions) was a welcome stylistic juxtaposition. “Coming collectively to unpack questions round restitution and counting on museology’s previous and current was an necessary train,” he advised AN. And for Karanja’s companion Stella Mutegi, the truth that the studio is within the enterprise of concepts, not conventional constructing, renders their ongoing explorations a pure match for the museum setting. “By constructed components at a gallery area, we will create a relationship between a setting, subject material, and the viewers,” mentioned Mutegi.

A 3rd piece on view, titled Cow Hall, equally meditates on histories of colonization in Africa. It straight references forgotten tales of historical Maasai grazing routes across the studio’s native Nairobi, which had been closed to communal pasturage throughout British colonization within the late nineteenth century. The principle draw for the duo in creating Cow Hall is to tie the social context of weaving along with architectural potentials underneath technical developments. “Weaving, after all, is an historical apply performed by many communities across the globe. However particularly within the international South, weaving is a type of development for shelter,” mentioned Mutegi. “We glance into how weaving may be, for lack of a greater phrase, upscaled.”

Like the remainder of the exhibition, Cow Hall is each a sculpture and a construction; an structure that deploys weaving as an architectural type, but one devoid of a utilitarian objective. As an alternative, it monumentalizes the fabric’s poetic heft at grand scale. Whereas the studio settled on rattan after experimenting with totally different supplies with numerous technical challenges, the wicker weave is, in response to Karanja, “an excellent method to discuss geology which is a static formation.” Cave_bureau sought to create a cave-like expertise, however from the destructive area as construction solely embodies the define of its ceiling.  “When you got here to Kenya, you’d be experiencing the cave, however right here, you might be seeing its void and the amount,” he added, “so that is quite a non secular expertise of an ecological type.” The duo believes this in-between orchestration additionally faucets into the present’s different theme of slavery via the lens of geology. In Mutegi’s phrases: “You’re observing the slaves holding area—the present manifests the concept we’re intertwined with the geology and weaving elaborates the concept we’re embedded in geology.”

Osman Can Yerebakan is an artwork, structure, design, and tradition author primarily based in New York.