From Ceràmica Cumella: Shaping Ideas – an exploration of the artistic and scientific innovations emerging from the studio of Toni Cumella – to Frozen Relic: Arctic Works – a series of re-fabricated real world scenarios using millimetre perfect 3D scanning technology to stage and capture transitory moments on location across the world – the AA's year-long exhibition programme casts a wide net across geographies, histories and cultures to investigate the realm and role of architecture and its unique relationship to the school.
Head of Exhibitions
Vanessa Norwood
Exhibitions Project Manager
Lee Regan
Exhibitions Coordinator
Sebastian Craig
Cultural Hijack
AA Gallery
26/4/2013 - 25/5/2013
From the creation of insurgent public spaces to the playful disruptions of public life, Cultural Hijack – curated by artists Ben Parry and Peter McCaughey – explores the role of art and the artist in contemporary society and offers the opportunity to rethink the growing field of intervention in relation to cultural activism and social change.
The exhibition presents a series of provocative interventions which have inserted themselves into the world, demanding attention, interrupting everyday life, hijacking, trespassing, agitating and teasing. Often unannounced and usually anonymous, these artworks have appropriated media channels, hacked into live TV and radio broadcasts, attacked billboards, re-appropriated street furniture, subverted signs, monuments and civic architectures, organised political actions as protest, exposed corporations and tax loopholes and revealed the absurdities of government bureaucracies.
Cultural Hijack occurs in three parts: a survey exhibition of documented artworks from across the globe, supported by a programme of artists’ talks; a programme of live-interventions, in which artists arrive in London to agitate and infiltrate the urban territory, starting in Bedford Square and moving out across the city; and CONTRAvention, in which the programme culminates in a carnival weekend of lectures, symposia, screenings, participatory actions, interventions, dinners and debate.
Photos by Sue Barr