Berlin artists Alekos Hofstetter and Holger
Lippmann join Toronto architects
Paul Raff and David Warne to examine the
deconstruction of urban architecture,
opening new perspectives on the functionality and
aesthetics of architecture
within time and geography. Co-curated with
journalist John Bentley
Mays, this exhibition is the latest in a two-year
series at the Goethe dealing
with urban transformations across cultures and
generations. Global as
the analysis is, its case studies are deliciously
local. Hofstetter and Lippmann,
working solely from documentary photographs,
deconstruct the Goethe-
Institut Toronto building through computer
animations, drawings and inkjet
prints. Working from their own
physical “unbuilding” of a century-old
Ontario cottage a decade ago, Warne and Raff
resurrect traces of the structure
through photographs, videos and remnants of
tattered fabric. Mays
notes this is an “art that resists hurry,” evoking “a
point of view in which
the seeker declines to devour information at the
speed of mass culture.”