Exhibition
Ribbons (The shape of an exhibition) - Auto Italia South East
RIBBONS! (The Shape of an Exhibition)
Breer Lazidj Nahr
Private view Wednesday 28 July 6-9pm
29 July - 22 August 2010
RIBBONS! (The Shape of an Exhibition) is a temporary project which will occupy the park opposite Auto Italia’s current location through July and August. Lengths of shiny, coloured ribbon are tied from the branches of one tree to another to form long squiggles and zig zagging lines which curve in one direction and then another as they are caught by the breeze. As the first installment of a larger project titled The Shape of an Exhibition, this outdoor installation acts as a sketch of what is to come.
The Shape of an Exhibition has been conceived to address the notion of an exhibition by considering and expanding both its site and its timeframe. A future sequence of projects will be realised through ideas about the past, present and future use of Auto Italia’s current buliding, with the permanent realisation of project being a playground on the site where the reflective, coloured ribbons now hang. The Shape of an Exhibition could be understood as a remake of a novel, The Shape of a City by Julien Gracq (1985), or a version of the final scene of Jacques Demy's film, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), both of which function as projections of their authors' recollected and imagined memories of a city.
As a prologue to The Shape of an Exhibition, RIBBONS! is a product of what it imagines, the long coloured lines of ribbon suspended in the branches of the trees above are a draft of the exhibition to come, like lines drawn on a floating page. When a magician is capable of removing a table cloth in a spit second without spilling a glass of water that stands on it, once the paper is taken away it leaves only the coloured lines.
