Fiji Biennale Pavilions (2003-2007)

Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand

(with Björn Dahlem, Sam Durant, Claus Fötinger, Emil Goh, Ani O’Neill, Meena Park, Peter Robinson, Kathy Temin)

Fiji Biennale Pavilions is an exhibition and a proposal for one yet to happen. It proposes an imagined relationship between Fiji Islands, contemporary art and modern architecture. It questions the meaning of the cultural translation - as a biennale and a discussion about it. Within the proposed Fiji Biennale Pavilions are exhibited A4-size written proposals from nine international artists. This biennale is to be housed in the pavilions that reconstruct famous exposition pavilions - those temporary structures that have a significant portion of the 20th-century architecture. The pavilions take the form of nine 1:150 scale Plexiglas models, installed on a display table. They are selected from a range of the national pavilions such as Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s L’Esprit Nouveau from the Exposition of Decorative Arts, Paris 1925; Marcel Breuer’s Gane’s Pavilion, Royal Show, Bristol 1936; and Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa’s Brazilian Pavilion, New York World’s Fair 1939. The final element of the exhibition is a sixteen-panel map of Fiji islands. The map impresses the geography of Fiji on the viewer. Rather than a singular super-resort, Fiji is revealed as an atomised archipelago - impossible to grasp as a whole.