21.09–11.10.14
group show
a collaboration between Jeamin Cha, Sophie-Therese Trenka-Dalton and Rebecca Ann Tess
AgvA-CIAT, Berlin
publication: »High Today What’s Tomorrow?«
work link: »The Tallest«
„All a man needs to own a skyscraper is the money and the land.
And he may be able to get along without the money.“ (Fortune magazine, 1920)
High Today What’s Tomorrow? assembles works by Jeamin Cha, Sophie-Therese Trenka-Dalton, and Rebecca Ann Tess that deal with the architecture of the new global centers of capital and power. Up until the end of the twentieth century, all of the world’s tallest buildings were found exclusively in the American metropolises of New York and Chicago. However, with the exponential growth of new economic centers, this initial North American superiority has given way to global competition. The construction of a new megatall tower has become a status symbol for the new elites. The exhibited works examine the staging of the tallest buildings from a variety of perspectives and explore their impact on the urban and social environment, as well as investigating their respective economic and political contexts.
Frequently the erection of a supertall or megatall tower, with its enormous financial cost, entails an economic crisis, often leading to a delay in construction. Jeamin Cha’s video work, Fog and Smoke (2012), makes clear the ghostly life that results from such an environment. She follows a tap dancer dancing through the still empty streets of Songdo, a free economic zone in South Korea whose construction began in 2003. Former inhabitants of the city report on the still unfulfilled promises of compensation for their expropriated houses and gaze from their new accommodation at Songdo in the distance: though it is marketed as a smart city, only uninhabited new buildings fill the horizon.
Sophie-Therese Trenka-Dalton’s recent work focuses on Dubai as a place of contemporary projection and appropriation. For High Today What’s Tomorrow? she has developed the text and image work I am Burj Khalifa (2014), a piece focused on what is currently still the tallest tower in the world. The wall piece combines a photo of a balloon with the inscription U.A.E. and a poem originating from the building itself which is exhibited on the way to the observation deck of the tower. In the poem the Burj Khalifa speaks of itself and its meaning for Dubai in the first person.Poetry, one of the central arts in the Gulf region,is combined with bold PR content: More than just a moment in time, I define moments for future generations. I am Burj Khalifa.
The competition for the tallest tower links together such diverse cities as Dubai, Shanghai, Mecca, New York, Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur. What is noticeable though are the similarities of the towers’ immediate environments. Regardless of on which continent or in which cultural or religious context the towers find themselves, in the upper levels farsightedness is demonstrated with an observation deck, while the lower levels are for the most part outfitted with gigantic shopping malls and food courts.
Rebecca Ann Tess has visited these places over the past few months and in her video The Tallest (2014) she shows the towers as set pieces of global capitalism, visually disappearing into abstraction while computerized voices point out concrete economic and political connections. Comprehending the tower in its entirety requires distance, making it almost impossible to take in when actually there, on-site. However, using 3D simulations, this is made possible. In this way the simulated image of these buildings, circulated in the media for representational or advertising purposes, becomes a substantial object and the actual spatiality becomes a mockup, one that no longer has to be entered to be experienced.
