Vito Acconci & Sarina Basta will perform a LIVE reading with music from Vladislav Delay's
Entain on the opening night.

After Houses Up The Wall (1985) and House Up A Building (1996), we thought, okay, maybe it's just about time for - House Up Your Ass. But, as the idea was actually seriously considered at one point, we were afraid the joke would be lost...on us.

So we thought we'd present, instead, houses and buildings of the mind. Buildings and habitations that could've been, should've been and others that were never meant to be. Some would call these projects utopian, or fragments of utopias; but as they are slightly warped -- either formally, or in the conceptual positions they take - they might also be called dystopian.

The selected projects for the exhibition No-Time in No-Land are probably a little of all of the above. They are designed for here-today; that is, tomorrow for New York, last night for Seoul. Does Utopian architecture follow a Utopian attitude and a Utopian community? Or does Utopian architecture shiver with undercurrents, with, on the surface, no idea to single out and no community to fret over? The concrete link between the projects of No-Time in No-Land is that they are ultimately un-built, and now exist only through their documentation. They all were conceived with a sense of urgency: to meet a deadline, to win a competition, to grab an opportunity. What kind of urgency is that? Can Utopia begin on assignment?

If we begin with the structure of a place, then we're working from the top down. Say we start instead from the bottom up, not the beach but grains of sand; the grains of sand might just as easily become concrete - the grains of sand might make a building as well as a landscape.

So we hijacked one of Vito Acconci's installations, Fan City (1981), to show that he was already thinking the city back then, a city for potential outcasts, long before being ingested by the very studio he created. Today, depending on the location of the piece, not all these groups of "marginals" would be left out. Outside shifts inside, inside squirms outside, and in the work of Acconci Studio, this becomes a formal device, one of a series of operations:

Make a world, a world-in-itself (...)

Break the world up into parts (...)

Strip the world down (...)

Now warp the world (...)                                  

Sarina Basta, November 2005

Vito Acconci was born in New York in 1940. His influential, provocative and often radical art-making practices have earned him international recognition. Acconci has been a vital presence in contemporary art since the late 1960s; his confrontational and ultimately political works have evolved from writing through conceptual art, bodyworks, performance, film, video, multimedia installation and architectural sculpture. Acconci Studio was formed in 1988 and is located in Brooklyn, NY. 'Vito Hannibal Acconci Studio - Word / Action / Architecture' is currently at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam until January 2006.

For press images or further information please contact:

Simon Parris +44 (0)7789 348 584 / simon@rovetv.net