Underskog

In Spring 2005, OCA launched an experimental off-site residency programme whereby the institution invited an international artist to enter into research or render a project supported by 03-funding*. In August 2006, this included providing the U.K. based artist Phil Collins with the opportunity to travel to Turkana to realize a performance project that would later be part of the OCA fall 2006 Semesterplan and of Momentum 2006.

Corey McCorkle traveled to India in the latter part of 2006 as part of OCA’s off-site residency programme to produce a short film around Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh. Tower of Shadows, as a final meditation on the incontestable Utopian poster-city of 20th Century, in spite of and perhaps because of the abject state of its incompletion, serves as a calm on Le Corbusier’s perforated monolithic vision. Designed to fill the gap left in the Punjabi state after partition in 1947, the new capital of Chandigarh was meant to be the inspiring city of the future — wide avenues flowing into expansive government plazas envisioned future pageantry on an impressive scale. Particularly, the Tower of Shadows at Chandigarh interests the artist as it is a structure to house nothing, a romantic pavilion … purely an optimistic essay of light and dark more than any municipal place of assembly, any place of use-value. More over, McCorkle is drawn to it as another irresistible and unyielding new ruin in the folds of 20th Century urbanism.

Corey McCorkle (b.1969) is interested in the Utopian ideas of nature and transcendence, which he pursues in many of his installations. McCorkle’s work has been included in the surveys Make It Now at Sculpture Center (2005) and Greater New York 2005 at PS1, and was featured in a solo exhibition in 2006 at Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland. McCorkle’s work has also been included in The Plain of Heaven by Creative Time in NYC (2005) and in Monopolis at Witte de With in Rotterdam (2005). Most recently, his work was included in Just Kick It Till It Breaks at The Kitchen in NYC (2007). McCorkle will have upcoming exhibitions at Pompidou Center, Paris and SMAK in Gent. He is featured in the November 2007 issue of Frieze.

*03 Funding: specifically designated funds made available by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for exchange with countries of the South in the field of contemporary art, discourse and production.

The presentation is not in Kunsternes Hus itself, but as a part of OCA (Office for Contemporary Art Norway).