Psycho Buildings, Hayward Gallery

Observatory, Air-Port-City, Tomas Saraceno, c Steven White

Hayward Gallery celebrates its 40th anniversary with Psycho Buildings. As a gallery designed with bréton brut ( literally meaning raw concrete ) in mind, the exposed space becomes a blank, grey canvas. The ten featured artists have the tenet of buildings, whose odd states of abandonment or demolition put them in an irrational world. This provocative environment is the artists’ playground, and as they transform the buildings the audience are invited to interact and perceive architecture and space in extraordinary ways.

I walked into Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto’s Stone Lip, Pepper Lips, Clove Love, Fog Frog, a super-sensory installation made of, bizarrely, wood, lycra and spices: cloves hang from one end of the vaulted dome and my itchy nose discovered pepper swinging from the other bulbous sack. There’s a false ceiling that cuts the room into half its height, which, along with the pungent smell of the spices, leaves a suffocated feeling. It is like walking under someone’s stocking.

Korean-born artist Do Ho Suh has created Fallen Star 1/5 : a 1/5 scale model of the artist’s childhood home colliding with his New England apartment. It is literally a clash of cultures with fine and careful attention to the details. His stronger piece,  the beautiful Staircase – V, is a basement staircase recreated using a sheer red fabric. Sewn by old ladies in Korea using traditional methods, it hangs from the ceiling and hovers above the floor. Again, the devil’s in the detail and there’s an overwhelming desire to climb these cloth stairs.

The piece is a soothing anecdote to the long queue for Gelitin’s normally, proceeding and unrestricted with without title, the Austrian collective’s boating pond on the rooftop terrace. Seeing heads sailing against the landscape creates an incongruous and surreal sight. This piece, along with Observatory, Air-Port City – a rather perplexing dome  - outside, people observe the people inside.; inside, you observe the people outside and above it.  On the clear platform you can crawl and tumble around the air pillow to observe the people below, inside and outside the dome – are the most popular installations.

The lower spaces connected by Life Tunnel hold two installations that  best show the core ideas of this exhibition - demolition and abandonment. In Cold Study of a Disaster, an apartment has exploded and all its furnishings are in pieces and caught mid-air, suspended in time. Next door, Turner-prize winner Rachel Whiteread shows Place (Village).  Known for her works on the theme of space and mystery, this piece is quick to evoke an eerie feeling. The darkened room is illuminated by a lightbulb in each of 200 dollshouses, collected by the artist over the last 20 years. The village is familiar and empty. Where have the residents gone and why?

Psycho Buildings is a deviation from rational architecture. This exhibition prods you to reconsider your relationship with the places you inhabit and the spaces around you. It’s all too easy to take these things for granted, and you will leave this show with a different and more open perserpective of space.

Audrey Khew

Psycho Buildings, The Hayward Gallery, South Bank Centre, Belvedere Road, London, SE1 8XX, until 25th August,
www.southbankcentre.co.uk

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