Bernd Behr
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Amoy Gardens

Picture
Installation view, Bernd Behr, Amoy Gardens, 2003/07, 35mm slide projection with audio, 34 slides, dimensions variable.
Amoy Gardens consists of a 35mm slide projection depicting 34 scenarios in and around the eponymous building in Hong Kong, a large-scale development including apartment blocks above a shopping mall. The complex became an epicentre of the region’s 2003 SARS crisis through a malfunction of its ventilation and plumbing systems, leading to a perpetual circulation of the virus throughout its interior. The timed, looped projection is accompanied by an audio recording of a young citizen of Hong Kong reading extracts from Exact Air, Le Corbusier’s treatise on hermetically sealed architecture (The Radiant City, 1933). The difficulties she experiences during the reading  re-invent the manifesto, generating a new contingent space of the narrated image between crisis and proposal.

Exhibitions: Titos Bunker, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, 2017, Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, 2015, Arko Art Center, Seoul, 2014, The Cube Space, Taipei, 2014, Para-Site, Hong Kong, 2013, , Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, 2010, Alexia Goethe Gallery, London, 2008.

Images and transcript.
​Bailey, S. (2013) 'A Journal of the Plague Year', Artforum, June 2013.
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