Australia’s exhibition at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, The Pool, has opened.
Curated by emerging architecture practice Aileen Sage (Isabelle Toland and Amelia Holliday) and urbanist Michelle Tabet, The Pool is Australia’s first architecture exhibition in the new pavilion designed by Denton Corker Marshall and completed in 2015.
The exhibition taps into a place deep within the Australian cultural identity. “[The pool] is one of Australia’s fundamental public spaces,” Tabet told CNN Style. “It’s is a place where people come together; they’re equal, they’re level. The sun shines the same on you whether you’re the prime minister or a student… That’s a really interesting proposition for architecture.”
The exhibition uncovers stories, which reference places and projects significant to the overall Biennale theme: Reporting from the Front. The theme set by the overall creative director Alejandro Aravena called on curators of national pavilions to share stories of architecture “improving the places where life occurs.”
In the main room of Australia’s national pavilion, a 60-square-metre shallow pool, about 30 centimetres deep dominates the space. Light reflecting off the water casts fluid patterns on the walls of the white box interior of the black box building.
The Pool exhibition curated by Aileen Sage and Michelle Tabet features a 60-square metre shallow pool in the main room of the Australian pavilion designed by Denton Corker Marshall.
Image: Brett Boardman
A series of steel-framed pool chairs are scattered around the space. The chairs, which feature colours reflecting Australia’s desert centre, are designed in collaboration with Northern Territory-based industrial designer Elliat Rich and manufactured by the Centre for Appropriate Technology in Alice Springs.
As the Australian creative directors explain, “The pool is a setting for the sharing of stories, tales of personal and collective struggle, of community building and transformation and refusal of the status quo.”
“Pools in Australia are currently facing significant challenges as social institutions,” they continued. The threatened closure and demolition of public pools is a perennial theme of community protest and activism and is an issue to which architects and urban commentators are inevitably drawn. By identifying the pool’s cultural importance to Australia, “we are pushing for a more critical engagement with the civic and social values that underpin our work as architects.”
The creative directors selected eight prominent Australian cultural leaders to share their personal stories of the relationship between the pool, its architecture and Australia’s cultural identity, which will be told through sound installations in the exhibition space.
The Pool exhibition curated by Aileen Sage and Michelle Tabet in the Australian pavilion designed by Denton Corker Marshall.
Image: Brett Boardman
The leaders include Olympic gold medal swimmers Ian Thorpe and Shane Gould, environmentalist Tim Flannery, fashion designers Romance Was Born, authors Christos Tsiolkas and Anna Funder, Indigenous art curator Hetti Perkins, and rock musician Paul Kelly.
“Their narratives move from the scale of the body to the scale of the continent and together they reveal the many powers of the pool: as a means to enable survival in an unforgiving landscape, to tame our environment, to provide spaces that facilitate a direct contact with nature, to create democratic social spaces, but also spaces for healing racial and cultural division,” the creative directors said.
In opening the exhibition, Indigenous Gumbaynggirr elder and poet Aunty Bea Ballangarry performed the ‘Guunumba Elements Ceremony’, which draws upon elements of earth, air, fire and water, providing a rich and immersive introduction.
The Pool is presented by the Australian Institute of Architects. The 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale is open from 28 May to 27 November 2016.
