Architecture and narrative- L.Gillick, A.Ogut

Today's rather refreshing conference was held between Liam Gillick, British artist presenting German pavilion, and Ahmet Ogut, Kurdish artist presenting Turkish pavilion. The discussion was coordinated by Tim Griffin, the editor of Artforum.

The peculiarity of this conference was the decision to confront precisely these two artists. Usually, we have almost immediate association of Gillick with the rest of the relational artist. But this time, confronting his work with the one of Ogut's, gave a new and refreshing prospective to his art practice. This was also a great opportunity to point out the importance of Ogut's work, for he's still little know in the western art scene. The fact that the whole auditorium was completely full was just one of the indicators how much was interesting this kind of confrontation.

The main discussion was about the importance of pavilions, buildings, spaces in general and their relavance in a creation of ones identity. Can they be observed as a carriers of doubled identity, as Ogut would put it. According to him, when seen trough the eyes of narrative, the identity of pavilions could be thought of as the objects in themselves or as the artist in a subjective role. On the other hand Gillick, in his work,  was taken by the idea of a "pavilion that was never built". He was trying to rethink about the structure and the concept of the given and rather complex space. As he puts it: "I still wanted to fight the building without talking about the things we already know about." To use a given space, along with its historical implications, in all its potentiality but by narrating, in a same time, about its present conditions form a different prospective. For Ogut "if you rebuilt a building than it becomes melancholy". It's not by chance that his buildings have frozen a few seconds before their irreversible destruction. By doing so he suspends time, space and our memory engraved in them. Even dough it might be seen as rather private reflections one could have, that intimate memory spreads easily into a collective one. As a silent hunter.