Langlands and Bell
Langlands and Bell
'Expanding their interest in buildings'
Langlands
and Bell.co.uk
Ben Langlands
and Nikki Bell
The House of Osama Bin Laden
Irish Museum of Modern
Art
Dublin
An exhibition featuring
an interactive digital model allowing a virtual exploration of the former
home of Osama bin Laden opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern
Art
on Wednesday 10 December 2003.
The model is one of six works by British artists Ben Langlands and Nikki
Bell on show in
Langlands and Bell: The House of Osama Bin Laden over the next two months.
All of the works are the result of a two-week visit to Afghanistan in
October 2002 on a research commission for the Imperial War Museum, London.
Using a still and a digital video camera, Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell
recorded visits to
ISAF HQ (the multi-national task force in Kabul led by the Turks at that
time), the American
airbase at Bagram, a murder trial at the Supreme Court in Kabul, the site
of
the statues of Buddha at Bamyan that were destroyed by the Taliban, and,
after
a long and dangerous journey, the former home of Osama bin Laden at
Daruntah, west of Jalalabad, where he lived
for a brief period in the late 1990s.
In The House of Osama Bin Laden, 2002, viewers can navigate through whitewashed
rooms
store cupboards and bunkers and even gaze out of the windows at the surrounding
countryside. While bearing testimony to bin Laden’s absence, it
also serves as a
reminder of his forbidding presence in the Wests’ collective consciousness.
On arriving in Afghanistan Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell were immediately
struck by the large
number of NGOs (Non-Governmental Organisations), UN and other donor agencies
operating in the country and began taking photographs of the signs they
place in the streets to advertise their presence.
These images are being shown as a slide sequence in the exhibitions alongside
an animated film using the acronyms of the NGOs in a series of graphic
templates.
Zardad’s Dog (2003) is a short film edited from live footage that
the artists shot at the trial of a
notorious war commander at the Supreme Court in Kabul. In this extraordinary
piece, justice
does battle with evil in scenes that seem to have come straight from Biblical
times.
Ben Langlands (born London 1955) and Nikki Bell (born London 1959) have
been collaborating
since 1978, and exhibiting internationally since the early 1980s. Based
in London, they create
works which explore the complex web of relationships linking people and
architecture.
Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell examine our experience of architecture, and
our primarily urban
culture on many different levels, exploring the places and structures
we inhabit, and the routes
that penetrate and link them. Their work looks at real buildings and the
ways we think
about them, revealing their histories and associated human activity.
Major exhibitions of the work of Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell include:
Serpentine Gallery, London, 1996
Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany, 1996
Architecture as Metaphor, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1997, Venice
Biennale, 1997
Sensation, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1997
Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 1998 and Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1999
Frozen Sky, Centre for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu, Japan, 1997; TN Probe,
Tokyo, 1998
Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 1998
Yale Center for British Art, New Have CT., US, 1999
The Central House of The Artist Moscow 2000
Turner Studio Residency Exhibition, Petworth House, Petworth, UK, 2002
The House of Osama bin Laden, Imperial War Museum, London, 2003
Henry Urbach Architecture, New York.