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Bernd Behr's work draws on a fascination with places and events that release architecture from its ascribed function. Working in video, photography and sculpture, he investigates the performative potential of the built environment in its relationship to the photographic and moving image. For this exhibition, Behr presents two works loosely connected to each other.
'Amoy Gardens', a 35mm photographic slide and audio installation, features images taken in and around a large building complex in Hong Kong - part residential, part shopping mall - which was the epicentre of the region's SARS crisis in 2002. While faulty plumbing was eventually discovered to have freely circulated the virus throughout the building's interior, resulting in a mass evacuation, Behr's work inverts the catastrophe into an architectural proposition. As his images linger on empty corridors and spaces, the voice of a young Chinese woman reading from a treaty on 'Exact Air' by Le Corbusier accompanies the projection. In earshot of the voice over is 'Topographic Obscenities', a new large-scale photographic work made specifically for this show. The diptych displays a vertical landscape of rocks, debris and plumbing, fused under a layer of sprayed concrete. Both works play with notions of sedimentation and the architectural subconscious...
