Art

Hans Schabus
Until Jun 1
This event has finished
Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London, EC2Y 8DS
Rating:
By Martin Herbert

Posted: Mon May 12
Perhaps most famous for grafting a faux Alpine peak onto the exterior of the Austrian Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale, Hans Schabus is big on site-specificity and boggling displacement. Not surprisingly, then, his installation in The Curve pulls the whole venue into its orbit, and then takes it somewhere else. Running the length of the 80m-long corridor, regiments of diverse seating are strapped to one wall in three tidy rows, as if the floor had rotated disorientingly through 90 degrees. The chairs – from moulded conference seats to office swivel chairs, concert seating to svelte Arne Jacobsens, etc – are the venue’s own, suggesting a capsule design history amassed almost by accident. And one that’s floating in space: sort of, anyway, since Schabus has modelled his array on the layout of a large aeroplane, mirroring the strict class divisions of air travel.

Here then is the Barbican as condensed and self-contained entity, one whose high-cultural programming – enabled by cadres of lower orders – can be read through its most ignorable facets. Yet this isn’t a purely critical piece: perhaps more interestingly, it’s a game of epic, uneasy, open-ended spatial shifts. From moment to moment one occupies a gravity-free aeroplane interior, a giant carousel (aided, admittedly, by a photograph of one near the entrance), and a microcosm of the entire institution. Considering Schabus just shuffled a few seats around, that’s not a bad result.