HOME/AWAY: FIVE ARCHITECTS BUILD HOUSING IN BRITAIN AND EUROPE

The British Council has appointed the award-winning architecture critic Ellis Woodman to curate the British Pavilion for the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale.

This year’s Advisory Panel for the British Pavilion were architects David Chipperfield and Farshid Moussavi; Financial Times Architecture Correspondent, Edwin Heathcote; curator Francesca Ferguson, Director of SAM Basel; and Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum.

Woodman’s exhibition will examine how five contemporary architects, all inheritors of the generation gap that ensued when Britain’s programme of post-war reconstruction drew to a close in the 1970s, are beginning to address the question of housing again.

The British Council’s Head of Design & Architecture, Emily Campbell, said: ‘Our advisors for the 2008 Pavilion agreed that housing is the key issue that architects, developers, builders and government in the UK need to address. They wanted to consider the scale of Britain’s housing challenge and its potential to contribute to progressive architectural, social, commercial and legislative thinking. Ellis Woodman’s proposed exhibition will do just that in an intellectually rigorous and thought-provoking way.’  

Woodman says that the exhibition will not only explore the roots of the British obsession with home ownership but the effect of the long-term domination of housing by private-sector developers in the UK. He asks: `What housing might persuade the British to raise their families in cities? Why are we building the smallest new houses in Europe? Is the public sector enabled to tackle the housing crisis effectively?'

The exhibition will investigate these and related questions through the work of five British architects who are building housing both in the UK and abroad. These are: Sergison Bates, Tony Fretton, de Rijke Marsh Morgan, Witherford Watson Mann and Maccreanor Lavington. Woodman added: `These architects’ experiences of different housing cultures will serve as a means of interrogating the successes and failures of the British condition’.

Ellis Woodman is the architecture critic of The Daily Telegraph and buildings editor of Building Design. Born in 1972, he studied architecture at Cambridge and North London universities and was a practising architect for seven years. He has been named the International Building Press Architecture Critic of the Year twice and is Britain's representative in the CIVA anthology of architecture writing: Looking at European Architecture: A Critical View.

The 11th Venice Biennale of Architecture will be open to the public from Sunday 14 September to Sunday 23 November, 2008. This year’s Biennale is under the directorship of Aaron Betsky, former of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) of Rotterdam, and now Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum.

In recognition of the complexity of housing as an issue in politics and commerce as much as in architecture, the British Council will organise a debate on housing during the opening days of the Biennale. The international panelists for this debate will be convened by the architecture critic and Architectural Association professor Irénée Scalbert.

Venice Biennale 2008:
11, 12, 13 September: Vernissage days
14 September - 23 November: Open to the Public

The British Council is delighted to announce that Steve McQueen has been selected to represent Britain at the 53rd Venice Biennale.  McQueen will present a solo exhibition in the British Pavilion to be shown from June to November, 2009.

Born in London in 1969, McQueen works predominantly in film and is considered one of Britain’s most influential artists. He was awarded the first ICA Futures Award in 1996, the Turner Prize in 1999 and an OBE in 2002.  His work is represented in museum collections throughout the world and he has shown widely in important group and solo exhibitions.  These include Documenta X  and XI, the 50th and 52nd  Venice Biennales, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museu Serralves, Oporto, Fondazione Prada, Milan, and the Renaissance Society, Chicago.

As Official War Artist to Iraq, commissioned by the Imperial War Museum in 2003, McQueen generated international media attention with one of his rare non-film works Queen and Country. His first feature film Hunger, commissioned by Channel 4/Film 4, won both the Camera d’Or and an International Film Critics Federation Prize at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, in addition to the inaugural Sydney Film Prize, for best film at the Sydney Film Festival.

Steve McQueen is represented by Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris. He lives and works in Amsterdam and London.

For more information please contact Antony Watson on +44 (0)20 7389 4872 or email Antony.Watson@britishcouncil.org  

McQueen is represented by Thomas Dane Gallery, London. For inquiries please contact Martine d'Angelejan-Chatillon at martine@thomasdane.com or phone +44 (0)20 7925 2505. For further information about the gallery, please visit www.thomasdane.com

The British Council works with an advisory committee of leading arts professionals across the UK who advises on the artist selection for the Venice Biennale every two years. This is to ensure that the selection process is transparent and broadly based. The advisory committee met on June 19 2008 and was made up of:

- Martin Barlow, Director Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno
- Katrina Brown, Director The Common Guild, Glasgow
- Penelope Curtis, Curator Henry Moore Institute, Leeds
- Stephen Deuchar, Director Tate Britain
- Alex Farquharson, Director Centre for Contemporary Art, Nottingham
- Jack Persekian, Director Al Ma’mal Foundation, East Jerusalem
- Declan McGonagle, Chair in Art & Design & Director School of Art and   Design, University of Ulster, Belfast
- Magdalene Odundo, Professor of Ceramics, University College of the Creative Arts, Farnham
- Richard Riley, Head of Exhibitions, British Council
- Adrian Searle, Chief Critic, The Guardian
- Chair: Andrea Rose, Director of Visual Arts, British Council

If you are interested in the minutes of the meeting, you can download them here.

The 53rd International Art Exhibition in Venice will run Sunday 7th June – Sunday 22nd November 2009. Next year the British Council will be celebrating its 75th Anniversary. It has commissioned artists to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale to celebrate the best of emerging and established British artistic talent since 1938, including Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Bridget Riley, Anish Kapoor, Mark Wallinger, Paul Nash, Gilbert & George, and most recently Tracey Emin in 2007, amongst many more.