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write-up/kultureflash_27.11.2008
The Showroom
Halfway through the Curating Architecture exhibition at the funky east London gallery space The Showroom, Rem Koolhaas and his OMA partner/AMO director Reiner de Graaf note that the the population of Europe is shrinking: "The urban substance of Europe in decline intersects China in ascension. The rice field next to the skyscraper in China's Pearl River Delta finds its counterpart in the derelict industrial estate surrounded by urban fabric in the German Ruhr Valley: in both cases the metropolis has become a field condition of dispersed moments of concentration." If such statements make you tick, this is a perfect show for a lazy Sunday afternoon, with a lot of interesting facts and stats, and very little in terms of surprises. It's a bit like a blown-up wall version of the kind of books that Koolhaas and AMO have investigated since Content. We get a timeline; we get another reminder that the signs for yen, euro, and dollars spell the word YES; and we get an OMA project, niftily presented in a book that can be read in two ways. More interesting is Walid Raad's Scratching on Things I Could Disavow in the easy-to-miss inner space, a completely contrasting white-on-white installation that clashes beautifully with the Dutch information overload a few meters away. Ângela Ferreira and duo Nikolaus Hirsch & Philipp Misselwitz are yet to come in this accumulative exhibition, which also includes talks.