Past Exhibitions

Temporary Structures: Performing Architecture in Contemporary Art is on view from September 18–December 31, 2011. This exhibition features thirteen artists and
collaboratives who underscore the changeable and active nature of our built environment. In doing so, they take architecture beyond its obvious function as shelter and design and examine its social, psychological, and cultural resonance in our lives. Video, sculpture, installation, and performance converge to address architecture through three broad themes: intervention, mobility, and participation.

Over the past 50 years, architecture’s agency in society has emerged as a growing concern for contemporary artists. Be it the white-cube space of the gallery, the historic walls of a specific site, or the loaded evocations of Modernism embedded in glass and concrete surfaces, artists and theorists agree that there is no such thing as a neutral environment—every space speaks.

"We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us."—Winston Churchill

Churchill delivered this truism in response to the wartime bombing of the House of Commons in London. An unsteady climate asks us to pause and reexamine our
surroundings, as ideals and places that we once thought infallible and reliable begin to crumble away—a symbolic building, a free market, housing investments, or political ideals. In the aftermath of recent man-made and natural disasters, and in the decade since the attacks on the World Trade Center towers there has been a media wave bearing collective witness to the unreliable nature of architecture’s capacity to protect and shelter us. The artists in this exhibition infuse buildings or the idea of buildings, typically considered static and stable, with the element of time through architectural interventions, changeable environments, and participatory performances. In approach and framework, these artists merge two dominant strains of art practice today—time-based performance and architectural subject matter. They ultimately destabilize our idea of fixed space and present a collective notion of the changing, almost living, nature of architecture, blurring the lines between the organic and built worlds. Accordingly, buildings are viewed as active agents within our social lives, informing and performing human behavior, changing states, and telling stories.

Temporary Structures: Performing Architecture in Contemporary Art uses nontraditional spaces of the Museum’s unique building and outdoor spaces to present an
avante-garde exhibition comprised of site-specific, performative, and participatory installations, engaging Museum visitors in a new way throughout the duration of the
show. 

Featured artists:

Vito Acconci, Ant Farm, Mary Ellen Carroll, Kate Gilmore, Liz Glynn, Gordon Matta-Clark, Mary Mattingly, Sarah Oppenheimer, robbinschilds, Alex Schweder La, Ward Shelley/Douglas Paulson, Mika Tajima, and Erwin Wurm.

Temporary Structures  will be accompanied by a full-color catalogue, featuring guest essayists Neil Leach, architectural historian and theorist and Professor of Architecture at the University of Southern California, and Giuliana Bruno, Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Organized by Dina Deitsch, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art.

This exhibition has been made possible in part by a major grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and by generous matching support from Anthony and Beth Terrana.    

The catalogue publication is made possible through a generous grant from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation.

Click Here for the robbinschilds collaboration with students from SMFA, Instruction Construction deCordova.

The Boston Harbor Islands Pavilion 

The Boston Harbor Islands Pavilion, located on the Rose Kennedy Greenway, was created to welcome visitors to the Boston Harbor Islands national park area. In the evening, video programming will be shown on two 8 x 10 foot LED screens, transforming the Pavilion into a compelling destination.

To begin a series of future commissioned video installations, deCordova's Associate Curator for Contemporary Art, Dina Deitsch, has guest-curated a video program called Nature Special, that features five videos about our mediated relationship to the great outdoors by artists Jim Campbell, Sam Easterson, William Lamson, and Suara Welitoff. 

Nature Special  will be on view in the Boston Harbor Islands Pavilion each evening, and features work that presents the natural world through the mediating lens of the camera. The videos in this program underscore a more common interaction with nature—through the screen—not unlike our favorite television nature specials. The Boston Harbor Islands, in contrast, offer a rare, unmediated experience of the natural world, framed, not by roads or the television monitor, but by water.

Learn more about the Pavilion

Learn more about the Boston Harbor Islands

Map of the location of the Boston Harbor Islands Pavilion

 Nature Special

Click on the arrow for stills from Nature Special and images of the Boston Harbor Island Pavilion.

Please see the Bio tab for information on the featured artists:

Suara Welitoff

Sam Easterson

William Lamson

Jim Campbell