OMA exhibition, Barbican Centre © Helen Kearney 2012

Corinna Gardner is a curator at the Barbican Art Gallery, and has worked on the current exhibition OMA/Progress, which features the architectural firm OMA, headed up by Rem Koolhaas. Corinna was a student on the V&A/RCA MA course in the cheap viagra description.

What was your route onto the RCA/ V&A course?

Well, it was a slightly circuitous route–I first started university training to be a designer, on a joint honours course at UCL, in Italian and design, and it did not go quite as I had hoped, so in the end I only completed two years of a four year course. I went on to do art history at undergrad and then still not knowing quite where my natural home was, the V&A/ RCA course offered me an opportunity to apply the academic approach to a subject in which I had a long standing interest. The course confirmed that I didn’t want to be on the making side, that I wanted to be on the interpretive side.

Can you reflect on the course now, with some distance?

The course was phenomenally useful in a number of ways, it gave one a theoretical grounding in the field, and in a new academic field, but also direct experience in a museum institution. The friends, the networks I made whilst on the course have been fundamental to moving forward in a career in this field, and I continue to maintain contact and friendships with those whom I studied alongside. I enjoyed it very much.

Can you explain a little about exhibitions you have worked on?

I joined the Barbican four years ago, and I’ve worked on photography shows – Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, contemporary art, and on the design and architecture front, Le Corbusier, Ron Arad, a Japanese fashion retrospective and now OMA, and I am contributing to the upcoming Bauhaus show. In the Curve, I’ve been involved in bringing the first architect into the Curve Art programme, Junya Ishigami. This was a real success, and a relief, because it was quite a challenge to get the idea passed that architecture in the space would work – and we then plumped for a project that was incredibly delicate.

Could you describe the OMA show?

OMA/Progress is the first exhibition of the work of OMA – a Dutch architecture practice co-founded by Rem Koolhaas – in ten years. And it’s the first significant exhibition of their work in the UK. It’s a show that has been guest curated by a young Belgian collective, Rotor, and it’s been a completely rewarding but also a completely challenging project over the last six months.

Barbican Art Gallery West Entrance © Helen Kearney 2012

In relation to Barbican, one of the most interesting aspects, to my mind, is the opening up of the west entrance to the art gallery. One of the current preoccupations of OMA and the team is the notion of preservation, it’s the use and reuse of historic buildings and this idea that you need to preserve the current but also the historic, and how this absolute preservation of space is potentially to the detriment of change and the ongoing. So not only on that level is the Barbican a fantastic place for the show, because it is an incredible building, but it’s an historic, heavily listed environment. The west entrance is interesting because it is an entrance to the gallery which has always been there and was intended to be a primary access point to the Centre by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon – [but] due to changes in planning during the construction of the Estate and the Arts Centre, it has never been in use. So here we have a huge, imposing ceremonial staircase that takes you up to this entrance and OMA and Rotor decided to cut a significant hole in our gallery wall and open it up. It creates a public space in the gallery, and it’s the first time that you access the gallery from the high walks and without first having paid for your exhibition ticket.

The show is across two spaces, and is quite difficult to give an overview of, as it in no way is supposed to be a comprehensive survey of the work of OMA. And this has been a very interesting but also challenging point in trying to convince that this show would work. In general, the feedback and response has been incredibly positive, though it has irritated a few people and provoked them quite considerably, but I think that’s part of what you do if you’re creating an exhibition that is daring and fresh. So yes, [in the exhibition] it’s difficult to know which projects have been built, which have been completed, which are on hold, which will never get built – but in bringing together ideas, projects, emails, slides, whatever you’d like to imagine you could find in an archive, in loose groupings, Rotor have created an intimate and personal portrait of an architectural practice, and that shows, in large part, the processes of architecture, and the functions and operations and working methods of what is one of the most prolific practices working today.

The fact that the exhibition exposes the making process is really interesting to us – our site is called “unmaking things”, so it’s a preoccupation of ours. The OMA show for me therefore, was wonderful; OMA in this show as a practice comes across as chaotic – and very much like being at college.

That’s an interesting point as in October we had all seven partners here at the Centre speaking for the first time together in public and some of the debates focused on whether OMA was a school, because so many people pass through the office yet only spend a short period of time there. And the idea that actually, that the short period of time spent at OMA is such an education that it changes your career, pushes you forward, and if you look at some of the practices that have come out of OMA, individuals, leading architects now, there is a lot to be said for the learning experiences that one has whilst working at OMA. I think there are few practices that in the long term have survived in a business sense working in the way that OMA do, but I do think that this huge enthusiasm for creativity and just making making making to find solutions is something that absolutely characterises OMA, but also characterises the type of architecture that follows on from their practice.

To come back to your point that the processes behind design and architecture – which you see as so critical to the V&A/ RCA course – you are absolutely right, and on working on the Ron Arad show, process was hugely important to the way we shaped the exhibition here at the Barbican. We made short videos about how his pieces came into being that added such an insight into his work as a designer, of which you would have little idea if only being shown the finished projects or project. It is a conceit though, because in a way it is added value and a designer or architect wants the visitor to know that, because then you will pay more for the piece, value the work more. So it is a delicate balance.

Exhibition scene © Helen Kearney 2012

Exhibition scene © Helen Kearney 2012

Your MA thesis was about Museum as Shop and Shop as Museum -does this guide your thinking about the shop in the OMA exhibition?

My MA thesis was about the siting of the same object in the two environments. So you might have a Perriand chair both in the museum and in the shop, and increasingly, museums are less about the display of the singular item, and focus on the context in which the item was created, whilst the shop is all about the singular item, and so shops are looking more like museums and museums are including more and more of the contextual environment in which objects were made – the workshop, the home. Museums locate  value in an object through looking and understanding how it was made, whereas increasingly in the commercial market it is the display of the singular object that has innate cultural capital and thus value that is increasingly popular.

I don’t think there’s so much connection, but it’s interesting because Rem Koolhaas, as a teacher and architect, ran a project on shopping and is very, very interested in retail, hence the location of the shop; it’s the centre of the OMA exhibition. Its very prominent location in the largest area of the gallery was a product of the curatorial process as opposed to a distinct intention to give it that key focus. The thing that caught me by surprise – which in part because as a curator you get so involved in a project, and it’s so refreshing to have an outside eye – [was that] many of the critics were so keen on the idea of the shop as the centrepoint of the exhibition. Commerce and retail, it’s fundamental to what we do here at the Barbican; sadly it’s evermore something that we have to consider in what we do in the current economic climate and the current government’s approach to the arts. But that said, yes the shop has a prominent location in the exhibition, but if you asked our colleagues in charge of retail for the gallery, they’d say it’s one the least commercial shops we’ve ever done because it’s so OMA focused, it’s very selective in what it includes. It’s a perverse or perhaps surprising balance when you get behind the veneer of it being in the middle of the exhibition. And I think, having had the show up for over three months, people do treat the shop almost as a bit like an exhibit as opposed to a space of consumerism.

Could you describe the processes of setting up the exhibition, in relation to being a Barbican curator for an exhibition made with Rotor, as well as OMA?

It’s now two years ago that we made the invitation to Rem and OMA to create an exhibition here at the Barbican, and initially the invitation was made for a survey show, but it became very clear in the process of working with OMA that they absolutely did not want a retrospective.  So accepting that, we tried to find a means through which we could work together to create this exhibition. Then both the Barbican curatorial team and OMA went to the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, at which Rotor curated the Belgian pavilion, and it was a show that was based on the narrative of wear in architecture, and it was a really fascinating project. We all felt that it had a natural synergy with the current preoccupations of OMA, but also that Rotor had the potential to be able to assist us in the curatorial process, and we arrived at them being our guest curators. It was a really stimulating, dynamic, challenging at times but also incredibly fruitful collaboration – there was absolutely no way we would have the exhibition we have without Rotor’s intervention- and that is a large part because OMA gave Rotor the keys to the office, and they near moved to Rotterdam and they went to Hong Kong, New York, Beijing, investigating the work and offices of OMA.

What was my role directly? Well, a lot of curatorial practice is about project management, it’s also about shaping ideas, encouraging people in a way of thinking, looking at different avenues of research, reigning in preposterous ideas, creating a show in collaboration with your partners that works both for them, but also for the institution for which you work.

And what are you doing next?

What’s next for the Barbican is a large-scale Bauhaus exhibition that will tie in with the Olympic period in London. It’s a critical opportunity, it’s something hugely exciting, and having worked on Modernism at the V&A it’s almost a return to the familiar, and again very exciting because we’re a cross arts centre, so the dialogue that we will be able to create within the scope of the Bauhaus is something that other London institutions would not be able to, because we have theatre, we have dance, we have music.

The OMA/ Progress show is currently open at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, until 19th February

© Helen Kearney 2012. All Rights Reserved.