Outside Architecture

Outside Architecture at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery was the first in a collaborative curatorial project by Bernice Donszelmann, Tim Renshaw and Mary Maclean comprising four exhibitions and funded by arts organisations in the UK and Europe.

As a curatorial project, Outside Architecture (www. outsidearchitecture.org) engages in current debates around interdisciplinarity between art and architecture. Its premise is that art practices’ positioning outside the discipline of architecture affords a focused arena for critical practice-based and theoretical reflection on architecture’s premises and assumptions. The four exhibitions to date constitute a cohesive investigation of the processes of architectural and spatial construction via interconnected perspectives including: the tension between immediate perceptual experience and narrative/ representation (Architectural Fictions 2010), the construction of interiority within the frame of architecture (Interior Life 2010), and the occupation of architectural space as a process of ongoing and incomplete construction (One and One and One, 2012). Contributing artists and symposium speakers to ‘Outside Architecture’ include Amikan Toren, Dr. David Ryan, Fiona Crisp, Katrine Hjelde and Monika Ursina Jäger.

Donszelmann co-curated the exhibition and exhibited five works. The role of the exhibition was to look at how the work of installation itself can constitute a form of architectural construction. Donszelmann’s exhibited work at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery engages with the interface between surface and body as a mode of producing space.

Two conference papers by Donszelmann also contextualize these themes via their theorization of an acoustic appropriation of urban space (‘Drumming Order’ at Helsinki University) and painterly spatial construction (‘Proposal for a materialist arena: painted space’ at Brighton University).

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