Gallery
Photo
ARCHITECTS: Ognjen Krašna, Miloš Paunović, Nemanja Zimonjić ETH MSc
DRAWING OF THE LAGER: Guillaume Othenin-Girard ETH Msc
RESEARCH TO CONSTRUCTION: Scott Lloyd ETH Msc
PHOTOGRAPHER: Miloš Paunović
TEN is an association of researchers, architects, designers, writers and makers from leading international research institutions that seeks to develop interdependent and collaborative projects across the broad spectrum of cultural production.
“My definition of magic in the human personality… is the ultimate level of attentiveness.” Jim Harrison, writer and poet, 1937-2016
An ongoing conversation between architects and gallery directors helped to define the core values and ideas for this new contemporary art space in Southeastern Europe, located in old Belgrade harbor.
The values guiding us were formed mostly around a sense of place and a sense of appropriate, in all forms of operation and acts of design. Together, we were also interested in the harbor’s ‘ordinary’ surroundings, in which the daily frequency of workers coming and going from the vast quantity of storage spaces and warehouses forms the anonymous yet rich thread of production found behind our daily life and culture.
We believe art should be observed in a similar way, yet with finer and more gracious measures applied; therefore we appropriated an old warehouse, with its pre-industrial spirit and measure, into a contemporary art gallery with the working title ‘schauLAGER’.
The artworks are simultaneously stored and displayed in a building with a long memory of storage and traces of use. They have been placed according to the artist’s intentions, and conversations celebrating a working atmosphere and its associated acts of creation.
The spatial possibilities are numerous, yet precisely defined, by the placement of new walls; so that the language of architecture resonates with both lightness and heaviness through the acts of making the new and excavating the old. The rooms are structured into a series of scales and sequences that a visitor is welcomed to steadily discover.
We have repaired and expressed building loads and supports, vividly exposing the borders of the new and old. The attitude of the new architecture towards the found or uncovered remains simple and gracious. We believe traces should not be removed; yet newly imagined in a precise and careful ‘conversation’ through which a sense of culture is constructed.
Media: