Arni Haraldsson: The Goldfinger Project
The Goldfinger Project explored social utopian ideology through the photography of Brutalist architecture.
The project documents both fictional and factual narratives across a wide range of media from one of Brutalism’s key exponents and a leading figure of the Modern Movement; Ernö Goldfinger.
Contemporary scholar and artist, Arni Haraldsson has compiled key moments from Goldfinger’s lifetime and documented his legacy to architecture within the urban landscape. Haraldsson examines the accomplishments of Goldfinger through the presentation of photography, film footage, historical documentation, popular cultural memorabilia, sound and resourced information. The display includes material from such diverse sources as BBC newsreels of the Ronan Point tower collapse, the Barbican, Trellick Tower t-shirts, popular music songs, advertising campaigns, interviews with residents and James Bond movies.
The Goldfinger Project’ is Arni Haraldsson’s most recent investigation into the architecture produced during the High Modernist era of architectural history. This ongoing project of taking photographs and collecting material explores architecture as a record of social and cultural change. His work has taken him around the globe to numerous exciting locations from Rix Reinecke’s landmark Ocean Towers in Vancouver, Libera’s isolated Villa Malaparte on Capri to Le Corbusier’s Modernist city vision of Chandigarh in India.
Arni Haraldsson is a Vancouver-based artist and an Associate Professor of Photography at Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver. His practice documents aging examples of High Modernist architecture with the intention of examining historical changes in architecture, urban planning, and societal values. Arni Haraldsson’s work will be exhibited in EAST International 2007 and throughout the course of the exhibition will also be present at 2 Willow Road in Hampstead, London.
2 Willow Road is the home of Ernö Goldfinger and was designed by the architect himself. Located in Hampstead the building is open to the public and presents a complete Modern Movement home. For more information on 2 Willow road visit the National Trust Website
The Goldfinger Project is showing at SPACE alongside The Clearances by Shary Boyle
Both exhibitions are supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.
