WMMNA: Exploring The Architecture Of Fear

One of the reasons why i go through the trouble of taking one bus and two trains in order to get to Z33 in Hasselt is that the Contemporary Art Center regularly identifies and confronts phenomena, ideas and flows that characterize or affect contemporary culture. Their new exhibition, Architecture of Fear, examines how feelings of fear pervade our daily life.

Photo above: lkka Halso, Roller coaster (The Museum of Nature), 2004

Opening Architecture of Fear. Photo: Kristof Vrancken / Z33

The show explores how fear has moved from being an immediate emotional strategy for survival, the result of a personal experience, to becoming a constant, more abstract, low level feeling that paves the way for new infrastructures based on security, prevention and ‘risk-management.’ Without ever judging nor pointing the finger, Architecture of Fear asks visitors to put their anxieties into a broader perspective. Are threats of terrorism, viral diseases, pollution and financial crisis entirely unbiased and valid? Have some of them been surreptitiously fashioned by politicians and the media? Are CCTVs in the metro making me feel more secure or in danger, for example?

Opening Architecture of Fear. Photo: Kristof Vrancken / Z33

As Frank Furedi, author of Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right, explained in an article for Spiked, “The prominent role of fear today merely indicates that it serves as a framework through which we interpret a variety of experiences.”

Architecture of Fear has invited international artists and designers to investigate how fear as a mental construction can be built up through language and images. I’ve already mentioned the work of Charlotte Lybeer and Jill Magid. I’ll come back with an interview with Trevor Paglen soon-ish. In the meantime, here’s a quick walk through some of the works in the exhibition.

Ilkka Halso, Museum I (The Museum of Nature), 2004

Ilkka Halso, Roller coaster (The Museum of Nature), 2004

In Museum of Nature, photographer Ilkka Halso articulates his fear of a world where nature will be confined to museums, private amusements parks and performance spaces. The buildings will not only allow the inhabitants of the Earth to see what forests, lakes and rivers look like, they will also protects these last fragments of flora from threats of pollution and from actions of man himself.

Laurent Grasso, 1619, 2007

The works shown by Laurent Grasso in the exhibition are equally compelling and sinister but they are also more complex and allude to conspiracy theories and ambiguous military researches. The title of Grasso’s video 1619 refers to the year when Galileo Galilei first used the term “aurora borealis” in his writings.

Continue reading here.

Régine Debatty is the creator of the ‘We Make Money Not Art’ blog and an art show curator. She has also spoken at several conferences and festivals about the way artists, hackers and interaction designers (mis)use technology. Learn more about Régine Debatty.