Brutal truth: the artists inspired by

high-rise horror

Karim Kal, Entourage 1, la Guillotière/Lyon (2017). Photograph: Courtesy Karim

Kal/carlier | gebauer

The original architects of modernism had grand utopian visions. Decades

later, a new exhibition asks how their creations became the stuff of
nightmares
Skye Sherwin
Mon 5 Dec 2022 12.00 GMT

C ould the first modernist architects have guessed that their

utilitarian dream of houses as “machines for living” would turn into a

nightmare? Maria Taniguchi’s sparse 2010 film Mies 421 draws out the
surprising violence in the fabric of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 1929
Barcelona Pavilion. Initially built to broadcast the progressive values of
Weimar-era Germany, the building is pictured in old black-and-white slides
showing its facades and uninhabited interiors. Images of hard-edged
marble slabs and glass sheets flick past to the knife-sharp tick of a
metronome. Stab! Slice! Sever!
Taniguchi is one of 20 contemporary artists reflecting on this architectural
legacy in Horror in the Modernist Block, a new exhibition addressing the
way modernist buildings themselves have become emblems of horror. It is
set, fittingly, in one of the country’s most bombed and heavily redesigned
cities, Birmingham.

In Britain, the idea of scary modern architecture really emerged in the

postwar years, when its focus on function and efficiency was translated into
rebuilt towns, new road schemes, and tower blocks. By the 1970s, vertical
blocks, be they skyscrapers or council housing, had become bleak emblems
of self-enclosed social breakdown, such as the dystopian luxury apartment
block in JG Ballard’s High-Rise.

Yet while the show is rooted in Birmingham’s history, its curator, Melanie
Pocock, has cast a global net. “There’s a trans-cultural element,” she says of
the tradition linking horror with architectural modernism. “These horrors
can feel very different between generations and where you are
geographically in the world.” In Karim Kal’s night-time photographs of
social housing on the outskirts of Paris, darkness looms beyond concrete
portals, impenetrable and alien. In the Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen’s
magic realist film The Cloud of Unknowing, the divisions are more
personal. An apartment block’s occupants impress their identities on their
solitary environments to surrealist effect. They lead isolated lives in
unexpected interiors – a dank watery tank, a book-stuffed cell where
volumes move of their own accord – and become engulfed by actual clouds.

Is it the building itself that’s the culprit, or what it inherits: how it’s
instrumentalised and stigmatised?

Melanie Pocock
Modern blocks also emerged as a favoured language of authoritarian
regimes. Tanaguchi’s interest in modernists such as Mies van der Rohe, for
instance, began in her home country, the Philippines. Imelda Marcos, the
wife of Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, had a notorious “edifice
complex” and spent wildly on brutalist public buildings. It’s even said that
when an estimated 169 workers fell into quick-drying cement during the
construction of the Manila Film Centre in 1981, remaining workers were
told to prioritise finishing the building rather than recover the bodies. “It’s
partly why it’s important to look at these legacies today,” says Pocock.
“There’s a political amnesia. We need to remind ourselves where far-right
politics has come from.”
One of the exhibition’s most chilling reminders of tragic death is a simple
exit sign, positioned above the door leading out of the darkened film-
screening space. Conceived by the London-based artist Abbas Zahedi, who
lost an artist mentor, Khadija Saye, in the Grenfell fire, it recalls Jacob
Rees-Mogg’s crass suggestion that those trapped in the building lacked
common sense when they followed official advice to stay in their
apartments.
The human tragedies played out in these buildings are a far cry from its
early architectural vision of an unadorned, utopian international style for
all. For Pocock, the problem runs deeper than the architects. She cites
Chandigarh, the modernist city Le Corbusier created in the Punjab. “It’s an
amazing example of civic architecture but the whole foundation of that
project is based on what? Partition.”
Pocock hopes the show will help people consider where these buildings
came from, be it war, political propaganda or, in the case of Grenfell’s
flammable cladding, a superficial gentrification project. “Is it the building
itself that’s the culprit, or what it inherits; how it’s instrumentalised and
stigmatised?” she asks. “Is it doomed from the outset?”

Concrete jungle: four highlights of the exhibition

Karim Kal, Entourage 1, La Guillotière/Lyon, 2017 (main picture)
Kal’s photographs capture social housing on the outskirts of Paris at night.
“On the one hand it’s totally objective,” says curator Melanie Pocock.
“There’s no judgment in terms of the lives people live there. It’s what we
read into those images. They’re nexus points for political neglect.”

Monika Sosnowska, Tower, 2019

Monika Sosnowska, Tower (2019). Photograph: Patrick Jameson/Courtesy Monika
Sosnowska/Modern Institute Toby Webster Ltd

The link between avant garde architecture, authoritarian politics and death
emerges in twisted black steel sculptures by the Polish artist Monika
Sosnowska. They reference the radio towers erected by one of Lenin’s
favoured architects, Vladimir Shukhov, whose attempts to stretch material
limits led to builders being killed.

Maria Taniguchi, Mies 421, 2010

Maria Taniguchi, Mies 421 (2010). Photograph: Courtesy Maria
Taniguchi/carlier | gebauer

Taniguchi’s film explores Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s bastion of

progressive modernist architecture, the Barcelona Pavilion, commissioned
by a Weimar-era Germany that would soon descend into darkness. Pocock
reflects that the artist’s “own interest in the modernist idiom does come a
lot from the use of brutalism in the Philippines under the Marcos’s
dictatorial regime.”

Ho Tzu Nyen, The Cloud of Unknowing, 2011

Ho Tzu Nyen, The Cloud of Unknowing (2011). Photograph: Courtesy Ho Tzu

Nyen/Kiang Malingue. Hong Kong

Pocock describes this film set in a Singapore housing block as “a magic

realist tale. Characters are gradually encroached upon by the walls of the
building and the cloud. The building is an insidious invisible layer.”

Horror in the Modernist Block is at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, to 1 May.