Art Metropole

01 Feb. 2018

Book Launch - Berlin 2013/1983 - Daniel Young & Christian Giroux

Artist

Daniel Young and Christian Giroux

Time

5–7pm

Join Art Metropole and the Goethe-Institut for the Toronto launch of Berlin 2013/1983, a new publication by Daniel Young and Christian Giroux. Jutta Brendemuhl, Program Curator of the Goethe-Institut Toronto, will facilitate a conversation with Dan Young and contributing writer Kenneth Hayes.

Published by ARCH+, the artist book BERLIN 2013/1983 by the Canadian artists Daniel Young and Christian Giroux is an attempt to answer two interrelated research questions: what does one year of new building construction in a city look like, and how does this contemporary city compare to that of a generation earlier? Berlin is an intriguing case study, not least because of the changing geo-politics altering the urban fabric of both East and West Berlin. With encyclopedic pretension, the artists attempted to document every building completed in Berlin in 2013 presented alongside buildings erected one generation (approximately thirty years) earlier.

Devised as an imaging machine to destroy other images, BERLIN 2013/1983 counteracts the usual Berlin narratives in its analytical approach and presentation of its 784 building ‘pairs’. The artists began by photographing subjects at the northwest edge of the city and then traced a path that covers the entire urban area by zig zagging east and west following a boustrophedonic (as ‘the ox plows’) pattern, a process that began in February and ended in May of 2015. Rather than emphasizing a historical (centralized) or a modern (radial) urban development, the project’s radically democratic form gives the periphery of the city the same value as the centre. The iconic buildings of Berlin-Mitte are only found in the middle of the book and are lost among the sheer abundance of images of new suburban structures within this non-hierarchical inventory of architectural form, format, and function.

Inspired in part by the tradition of conceptual photography projects dedicated to architectural knowledge, 2013/1983 was conceived as a rigorous dérive and is a radical addition to the architectural discourse and published guides to buildings in Berlin. What was devised as a materialist case study in the political economy of construction of our contemporary moment – and of the just recent past – develops into a study of a local vernacular unfolding over time.

Two volumes, bilingual English and German, 1,568 pages with 1,568 images + text volume with 128 pages containing essays by Sandra Bartoli, Kenneth Haynes, Anne Huffschmid, and Anh-Linh Ngo.
Price: 80 Euro
ISBN: 978-3-931435-42-4

Published by ARCH+
Designed by Katja Gretzinger
Produced in partnership with the Art Gallery of Guelph, Ed Video
Supported by David & Yvonne Fleck, Phyllis Lambert, the Jack Weinbaum Family Foundation, and the Canada Council for the Arts

A recording of this event can be viewed here.

Daniel Young and Christian Giroux have been working together since 2002 producing urban / architecturally scaled public art, sculpture and films installations they pursue their interests in the production of space, the language of our built environment and the material world’s modernity in both its contemporary and recently past forms. In 2014-15 they completed commissioned projects for Square One, Mississauga, the City of Toronto, the City of Ottawa and the Toronto International Film Festival. Their latest project a document of one year of new construction in Berlin, and that a human generation earlier Berlin 2013 / 1983 is currently exhibiting at the Deutsches Architektur Zentrum, in Berlin.

Image

Berlin 2013/1983. Dan Young + Christian Giroux.

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