On displaying the Hidden
a digital exhibition curated by Rana Abughannam, Émélie Desrochers-Turgeon, and Monica Eileen Patterson; interviews by Pallavi Swaranjali and Ryan Stec.
Architecture orchestrates and orders through its engagement with the senses. Its surfaces can guide, conceal, constrain, protect, distort, overwrite, and deceive. The physical representation of architectural objects and the non-material elements architecture contains, such as sound, meaning, and feeling can be manipulated in service of competing uses and desires.
While most engagements with architecture focus on what is seen, the creative works presented here explore different, but interconnected mechanisms that constitute architectures of hiding in which physical and rhetorical surfaces conceal, erase, obscure, and reveal.
Concealed memories are probed in works that make visible the unacknowledged role of spatiality in hiding interpersonal violence embedded in the quotidian spaces we inhabit. Terror, discomfort, and anxiety are displayed on walls and drawings that normally silence and obscure what occurs within them.
Histories that have been erased are examined through works on state violence deployed through spatial restrictions, forced removals, new development, dispossession, and censorship. The pieces display the potential of memory and transparency to make tangible silenced stories.
Obscured views are explored through sight and its modes of deception. The artists employ a manifold of apparatuses to question the lines between visibility and invisibility, thus acknowledging the multiplicity of spectators and perspectives.
Finally, revealed narratives uncover the once concealed. Making visible the consequences of bodily gestures, the pieces expose the vulnerabilities of forms of labor as performances. The very process of revelation underscores ulterior motives.
Through dialogic relations between the concealed and the revealed, the works presented explore the inherent tensions of exhibiting the hidden -- that the masking of something can also expose its existence. Unravelling concealment apparatuses might disclose new forms of seeing and architectural encounters.
