I know it’s been a year, but I’m still excited by the fact Tate Liverpool is condensed into RIBA North’s gallery spaces.
Art, architecture and manufacturing make incredible partners, and Brickworks just reiterates that. All the works are from Tate’s collection, and are brought together into an exhibition that highlights one of the most universal things in human creation; bricks.
While the promotional material, and the majority of the work is very directly referencing bricks as a building material, Saloua Raouda Choucair’s ‘Poem Wall’ clarifies that the exhibition considers ‘brick’ as a structural element in the widest possible sense.
‘Poem Wall’ is a physical representation of a qasida (a purpose poem), a form of Arabic poetry where each line consists of two couplets, repeating that structure on every line until the story is fully built. Each piece of the poem is a brick. Two lines make a row. You can remove a line, and the poem works, but the narrative changes.
Representing the physicality of that, Saloua Raouda Choucair’s geometric bricks are interchangeable to create limitless unique wholes, but each brick has a partner that creates its own line.
Jannis Kounellis’ 1969 dry stone wall takes bricks very literally; created new in every gallery it visits, with local stone, and local crafters.
Part of my fascination with the work is the question of ownership. It’s part of Tate’s Collection, but only by virtue of its Intellectual Property; the idea of carving a standard doorway into a gallery wall, and perfectly filling it with drystone wall, built from local brick.
Beyond the idea, the artist is uninvolved, and after each installation, I imagine the brick is reused on other projects, rather than amassing bricks from every region it visits in collection stores.
So these bricks, potentially, get used as literal building blocks somewhere entirely outside their creative space.
It’s not particularly unusual now, for performative, transient artworks to be included in Tate collections. Since 2005’s purchase of Roman Ondak’s ‘Feelings in Good Times’, the performance section of Tate’s Collection has grown and grown. This isn’t strictly performance, but the nature of the untitled work by Jannis Kounellis, and the private performative quality of its installation, is a beautiful example of how collections respond to contemporary practices.
It’s also, more importantly, an ideal example of what bricks actually do.
The fact that Tate are at RIBA might mean one less massive multi-floor gallery for another year, but it also means this giant national culture brand are working harder to make exhibitions that add value.
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Brickworks is open at Tate Liverpool x RIBA North until 12th January 2025
Words, Patrick Kirk-Smith