Ideas of Utopia
Langlands & Bell will present a season of art and ideas in three parts at Charleston from 2 April – 29 August 2022.
Langlands & Bell : Ideas of Utopia presents 11 artworks from throughout Langlands & Bell’s 40-year career. The works examine attempts – knowingly and unknowingly – to create utopias, whether domestic, religious, social or commercial. Langlands & Bell are interested by Charleston’s history as a haven for counterculture, modernism and collaboration. The exhibition contextualises Charleston as an important place of early modernist social experimentation and a place where life could be lived differently.
We’re looking at ideas of utopia through architecture, and of course Charleston has a history of criticizing the status-quo, testing ideas for bringing new world into being, offering new ways of working and living together and new ways of thinking about the world. Charleston’s history is one of transforming life through art.
With loans from public and private collections across the UK and the artists own archive, Ideas of Utopia includes a film and remnants from the first work, now lost, that the artists made collaboratively, The Kitchen (1978), through to more recent work examining the iconic new headquarters of global tech giants – including Apple, Sunny Vale (2017), Alibaba, Hangzhou (2018) and Facebook, Menlo Park (2017).
Photos: The Kitchen (detail of New Kitchen) 1978; The Kitchen (detail of Old Kitchen) 1978; Facebook, Menlo Park, 2017; Facebook, Menlo Park, 2017, (Details); Five Piece Halls, 1993.
