The Hayward's new Project Space, offering a window onto the latest developments in contemporary art from across the globe, opens with Board Room, an installation by the Dutch artists' collective Atelier Van Lieshout on Monday 27 August 2007, 10am–4pm daily, late nights Friday and Saturday until 10pm.
AVL, founded in Rotterdam in 1995 by Joep Van Lieshout, is a multidisciplinary art practice encompassing installation, design, furniture and architecture, producing work which examines and critiques the commercial nature of contemporary society.
Board Room presents a series of models and urban plans alongside a dinner table laid with hand-illustrated crockery, all of which relate to the fictional SlaveCity, a dystopian metropolis which AVL began to develop in 2005. This sinister futuristic city acts as a model for social and environmental self-sufficiency, at once utopian and authoritarian, where 'participants' work for a prescribed number of hours each day in office jobs and workshops, before being allowed a few hours of relaxation before they sleep.
Whilst the regime offers its inhabitants no independence and severely restricts their freedoms, the city is entirely self-sufficient and communally run, producing its own food, using natural fuel products such as bio-diesel, solar and wind energy, and recycling its waste.
SlaveCity is an evolving, ever-expanding project that envisions this hypothetical business-cum-city and its economic structure in elaborately worked out detail.
This exhibition has been generously supported by the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam and Albion Gallery, London. The picture shows table with Mexican Crockery, 2007 Courtesy Atelier Van Lieshout Photo, Atelier Van Lieshout. -- www.southbankcentre.co.uk
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