Inside | Outside

Since the 1960s, art and architecture have experienced a radical and reciprocal trade: while artists have simulated ‘architectural’ means such as plans and models, built actual structures outside art institutions, or intervened directly into urban and public spaces, architects have evoked ‘artistic’ strategies such as sculptural objects and installations, inside art institutions, in exhibitions, biennales and art events. At the same time, art institutes themselves have combined both activities in an interdisciplinary, hybrid field, playing with the conditional differences between the literal and institutional boundaries of inside and out.

Expanding one’s practice was not only a matter of repudiating and transgressing the disciplinary limits and medium-related dogmas of modernism, however. It was also a question of choosing and evaluating instruments. After all, when “there’s only art” (Burgin) or when “everything is architecture” (Hollein), the methods and concepts of cultural practice, as well as the status of disciplinary objects, are up for grabs.

The conference Inside | Outside will focus on specific examples or ‘cases’ of the two-way directions of transaction: artists adopting architectural means on the one hand, and architects adopting artistic strategies on the other. In particular, it will study both historical and contemporary examples of the transposition of means and strategies from architecture to art, and vice versa, up to the point where their status, meaning or function is dislodged and transformed.

The conference Inside | Outside wants to investigate the potential openings and possible deadlocks of such exchanges, both in terms of the means and strategies they displace and the context in which they happen—that is, inside or outside institutional spaces and venues. In this sense, the interest lies less in how means and strategies mobilize disciplines than the other way around.

Each speaker is invited to discuss a singular project that exemplifies the reciprocal trade between art and architecture. Papers will address iterations of the current phenomenon of art institutions commissioning architects to produce temporary, largely function-less pavilions and installations; the exhibition of architecture; collaborations between artists and architects; and the use of architecture as a medium or subject by artists.

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The conference Inside | Outside: Trading between Art and Architecture is the inaugural event of ‘Is Architecture Art?,’ a research project of the Centre for Architecture, Theory, History and Criticism (ATCH), at the School of Architecture, University of Queensland (AUS) in partnership with the Department of Architecture & Urban Planning, Ghent University (BE). The project is funded by a Discovery Grant of the Australian Research Council (ARC). More information on the team and the ongoing research is available on the project website: https://isarchitectureart.com    

The conference is organized in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK), School of Arts, Ghent (BE), and kindly supported by Archipel.