Nettie Horn Gallery has had a break in, at least it looks that way. The windows are all smashed and the door has been ripped off its hinges. Except of course it isn’t...
Nettie Horn Gallery has had a break in, at least it looks that way. The windows are all smashed and the door has been ripped off its hinges. Except of course it isn’t. No burglar sweeps up the debris and encases it in a Perspex box in the middle of the room. This is the Danish collective A Kassen, a group of architectural interventionists who are known for their absurd interferences. I first saw them at the Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridge in 2009 where, with poetry in motion, they removed part of the gallery’s roof and flew a light aircraft over it. Since then they’ve turned the façade of a burnt out building upside down and twisted a street lamppost round so that it shone into an apartment building.
"It is a way of upsetting the natural order of things, forcing us to re-consider the way we perceive the landscape about us."
To understand why A Kassen do these subtle subversions we have to look back at a history of performance art that started with the likes of John Baldessari in the 1960s. It is a way of upsetting the natural order of things, forcing us to re-consider the way we perceive the landscape about us. A Kassen’s new installation, called ‘17A Riding House Street’, references the riots last summer and the casual vandalism the Nettie Horn Gallery used to endure when it was still situated in Vyner Street in East London. Having now moved to chic new premises in Fitzrovia which they have renovated at vast expense, A Kassen remind them just where they came from.
17A Riding House Street is at the Nettie Horn Gallery until October 14.
Text by Jessica Lack
