Fiona Shipwright on urban angst in Mathis Altmann and Rathin Barman’s new projects  for the Statements sector

From L.A. to Kolkata, there is no place like home

by&nbsp;Fiona ShipwrightAnxiety about the ‘home’ links two projects in this year’s Statements sector at Art Basel. The fraught relationship with our lived environment underpins the work of Kolkata-based&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/15807/Rathin-Barman" target="_blank"> Rathin Barman</a> (b. 1981, Tripura, India), and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/search?q=altmann" target="_blank"> Mathis Altmann</a> (b. 1987, Munich, Germany), who works in Los Angeles and Zurich respectively.Both artists explore these inherent tensions against the backdrop of regeneration and consumerism in Kolkata and Los Angeles – two urban centres whose boundaries are continually rendered obsolete by the processes of sprawl and migration. Conceiving his work specifically for the Statements sector, Altmann, who is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/search?q=Freedman+Fitzpatrick"> Freedman Fitzpatrick</a> in Los Angeles, stages Non Toxic Revolution (all works 2018), while Prateek and Priyanka Raja’s Kolkata-based&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1363/Experimenter" target="_blank">Experimenter</a> gallery presents a series of works by Barman. In both projects, the architecture of the artists' respective locations is heavily referenced, both in terms of their materiality and the imaginaries they serve.

In Barman’s work, an anthropological approach serves as a way of pinning down a version of home constantly in flux. The drawings and sculptures he produces are informed by in-depth interviews conducted over several years with his subjects – some of the millions of East Bengalis, and their descendants, who migrated to Kolkata following the partition of Bengal in 1947. They occupied whatever buildings they could find, such as old military barracks left by the British, adding to these existing structures and also creating new ones using materials such as wood, bamboo, and corrugated iron. This process of informal city-making continued in the decades that followed, often resulting in several generations occupying the same (crowded) space. These unauthorized adaptations – ‘I don’t like the word illegal,’ says Barman – in both remembered and anticipated forms, as well as the spaces they changed, are (re)created by the artist. ‘I deal with memories of architecture, both personal and collective,’ Barman says of his approach. ‘Over the years I have been talking and interacting with both the owners and tenants of these buildings as well as spending time with the architecture itself, getting to understand it deeply.’ This in-depth process has allowed the artist to produce works from different temporal vantage points, evidencing the non-fixity of the architecture in which we root ideas and memories of ‘home’.

Placed on two tables at the center of the Statements booth is ‘Notes From Shared Living Spaces,’ a series of concrete maquettes that shows some of those vast colonial buildings in their contemporary, adapted form but with discrete brass accents that hint at previous layers, such as the ornate detail of an iron balcony. A series of drawings hanging on the wall behind, entitled ‘You Would Never See Them Again,’ renders alterations to such sites on paper using not just ink but also cement and metal, the precise rendition of their architectural details attesting to Barman’s engineering background. The wall-mounted Deadlines uses metal bars to produce an isometric sketch of the unmistakable form of a colonial building, the audacious character of such architecture now rejected, given the dilapidation and refashioning it has undergone. Hanging on the wall opposite is a series of mounted wall sculptures, ‘Simulation of Altering Another Home,’ which occupies a temporal in-between, documenting potential structural augmentations that have not happened yet – some entirely feasible, some that could only ever be fiction.In the face of these spatial and resource limitations, as well as legal struggles regarding post-colonial ownership disputes, the inhabitants have often constructed a notion of home that straddles two spheres: the one physically lived in day to day, and an imagined one that could be in the future. This process is akin to what Jill Stoner has characterised as ‘minor’ architecture – that which happens de facto, on the ground, and outside of the regulations of the ‘major’ architecture profession, engendered by the politics of daily existence. As she writes in Toward a Minor Architecture (MIT Press, 2010): ‘[It] takes place largely in situ, as existing buildings and constructions respond to desires for escape, for blurred boundaries, and for collective expression.’

This collective expression, and the actual and imagined forms it can take, is of particular interest to Barman: ‘By putting together the unauthorized spaces people are living in with the spaces they are nurturing in their minds, you end up with a simulation of a building – but in a very different way from one created using traditional architectural drawings and models,’ he says of this process of chronicling the ephemeral, adding: ‘I’m more interested in “home” than in the architecture itself. My research is about conversation, interacting with people, and their memories and accounts. Some of them feel more fictive than others.’Altmann too is concerned with modes of architectural projection, but where Barman considers them in terms of how they constitute a collective memory, Altmann looks to their collective perpetuation. In his piece&nbsp;Non-Toxic Revolution, the urban shifts affecting downtown Los Angeles, in particular the Arts District, are the focus. Works are presented in a booth that adopts – and subverts – the language of a corporate ‘urban revitalization’. Altmann finds the stories told as part of this process of redesigning entire urban areas disturbing and fascinating in equal measure: ‘It’s like a tragicomedy which plays into the narratives of my sculptures.’

In the booth stand five sculptures, each consisting of a plinth and model of a building facade. The plinths are constructed from discarded office furniture, the kind too outmoded for the international Airbnb aesthetic-bedecked co-working spaces of today. Given new purpose here (‘revitalized’), each plinth features on it a model of an architectural façade in miniature, with scenes of daily life – at home, the office, the coffee shop – visible through the windows. As in Barman’s works, there is an emphasis on materiality. The models are not made from typical neutral white foam board but from a combination of raw materials and domestic detritus: sections of dollhouses and pieces of furniture embedded within aluminium, plastic, bronze, glass, and concrete.This is a technique Altmann has utilised before: the sculptures in his 2017 show Wir sind das Volz also featured fragments of dollhouses, the classic encapsulation of the bourgeois American dream depicted in miniature. ‘I am fascinated by desires about dream houses and projections of safety, wealth, heritage, or family,’ says Altmann. But with this current work, ‘there are barely any Victorian dollhouses. There’s more attention on the condominium than on the single unit.’ This time the models incorporate the materials and vernacular associated with the mixed-use urbanism that is the hallmark of ‘regeneration’ projects – which are heavy on packing in as many units as possible but often light on community engagement. The key to the map of our new urban realities, the work suggests, are the urban-lifestyle narratives (or, to use Altmann’s sardonic framing, ‘options’) being constructed in the present.

The interrelation between architectural recollection and projection present in the practice of both artists is reminiscent of ground explored in Rem Koolhaas’s 2001 essay Junkspace, in which he ruminated on the architectonic residue engulfing us on an urban and, ultimately, planetary scale – what he termed modernization’s ‘fallout’. Seventeen years later, as the apparatuses of the smart city encroach into what gaps remain, vying with migration and sustainability scenarios so enduring that they can no longer be called crises, urban space appears to be suffused with new anxieties and causes of dislocation. Both artists are resistant to countering techno-positivist projections with apocalyptic polemics: ‘I’m not willing to be seduced by any junk-food pessimism,’ says Altmann, while Barman stresses that, in the Indian context in which he is working, ‘the majority of city dwellers are not concerned about the overall city and how its development it will affect their children; they are just living in the present.’ But notions of fallout aside, the works have parallels with the Junkspace depiction of the growing cognitive dissonance at play in the development of the urban realm, where, as the oft-quoted 2007 UN report World Urbanization Prospects states, by the year 2050 half the world’s population will apparently live. As Koolhaas surmises: ‘Judging the built presumed a static condition; now each architecture embodies opposite conditions simultaneously: old and new, permanent and temporary, flourishing and at risk.’ Somewhere in between all these layers is a place – the majority arising through circumstance rather than choice – more and more of us anxiously call home.Fiona Shipwright is a writer based in Berlin.Statements <g>presents</g> exciting new solo projects by emerging artists, who are eligible to receive the Baloise Art Prize. Participating galleries in 2018 include: <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/3523/The-Box">The Box</a> (Naotaka Hiro), <a href="http://www.sandy-brown.com/">Sandy Brown</a> (Aude Pariset),<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2005/Carlos-Ishikawa"> Carlos/Ishikawa</a> (<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/17622/Stuart-Middleton">Stuart Middleton</a>), <a href="https://croynielsen.com/">Croy Nielsen</a> (Georgia Gardner Gray), <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1856/Essex-Street">Essex Street </a>(<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/26104/Sara-Deraedt">Sara Deraedt</a>), <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1363/Experimenter">Experimenter</a> (<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/15807/Rathin-Barman">Rathin Barman</a>),<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1119/Freedman-Fitzpatrick"> Freedman Fitzpatrick </a>(<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/26513/Mathis-Altmann">Mathis Altmann</a>), <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1573/JTT">JTT</a> (Doreen Garner), <a href="http://www.jan-kaps.com/">Jan Kaps</a> (<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/11523/Daniel-Dewar-Gregory-Gicquel">Daniel Dewar, Grégory Gicquel</a>), <a href="http://antoinelevi.fr/">Antoine Levi</a> (Alina Chaiderov), <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/news/meet-madragoa">Madragoa</a> (Rodrigo Hernández), <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2056/Mary-Mary">Mary Mary </a>(Ektor Garcia), <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1226/mor-charpentier">mor charpentier</a> (<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/20853/Lawrence-Abu-Hamdan">Lawrence Abu Hamdan</a>), <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2057/Mor%C3%A1n-Mor%C3%A1n">Morán Morán</a> (Jacolby Satterwhite), <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1418/One-and-J-Gallery">One and J. Gallery</a> (Suki Seokyeong Kang), <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/4256/Deborah-Schamoni">Deborah Schamoni </a>(<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/23676/Flaka-Haliti">Flaka Haliti</a>), <a href="https://www.stigtervandoesburg.com/">Stigter Van Doesburg</a> (Helen Verhoeven), and <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1460/White-Space-Beijing">White Space Beijing</a> (<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/15763/Christine-Sun-Kim">Christine Sun Kim</a>).