Public Realm Projects
The gallery is a natural habitat for MADE UP, a space sanctioned for dreams and make-believe. Visitors come fully expecting to leave ‘real life’ at the door, and to engage with the world through representation, invention, and fiction.
MADE UP in the public realm lets the genie out of the bottle, unleashing its themes, ideas and processes onto the streets to find their place amidst the everyday. Mapping a MADE UP route through the city centre, the projects seek to reawaken a sense of wonder and enquiry in our experience of the day-to-day, and to resituate the act of imagining in ‘real life’.
Much of what we describe as ‘public space’ or ‘the public realm’ is rendered invisible by sheer force of habit. Whether the street we walk down or the train we take to work, public spaces provide the accustomed and often unseen backdrop to our daily life. The unquestioning acceptance on which familiarity and routine depend may allow us to mistake habit for incontrovertible reality. The MADE UP projects outside the gallery foreground imagination and invention as an essential component of lived experience and invite us, in the words of Georges Perec, ‘To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us’.
The commissions outside the gallery adopt a range of strategies to facilitate this playful encounter between imagined realities and actual experience. Several artists rework the familiar infrastructure of public space – whether street signage (Karvonen), hoarding (Richard Woods), or the public park (Diller Scofidio + Renfro). Others reveal hidden narratives in apparently inanimate bricks and mortar (Beninati, Just, Messager) or transport us to fictional worlds (Kusama). Some propose models for alternative futures, whether for specific sites (Atelier Bow-Wow) or humanity as a whole (Saraceno). Together, MADE UP in the public realm seeks to carve out small moments of wonder amidst the everyday, and remind us that if new realities are forged through ‘making things up’, then present realities too depend on the imagination for their construction.
Much of what we describe as ‘public space’ or ‘the public realm’ is rendered invisible by sheer force of habit. Whether the street we walk down or the train we take to work, public spaces provide the accustomed and often unseen backdrop to our daily life. The unquestioning acceptance on which familiarity and routine depend may allow us to mistake habit for incontrovertible reality. The MADE UP projects outside the gallery foreground imagination and invention as an essential component of lived experience and invite us, in the words of Georges Perec, ‘To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us’.
The commissions outside the gallery adopt a range of strategies to facilitate this playful encounter between imagined realities and actual experience. Several artists rework the familiar infrastructure of public space – whether street signage (Karvonen), hoarding (Richard Woods), or the public park (Diller Scofidio + Renfro). Others reveal hidden narratives in apparently inanimate bricks and mortar (Beninati, Just, Messager) or transport us to fictional worlds (Kusama). Some propose models for alternative futures, whether for specific sites (Atelier Bow-Wow) or humanity as a whole (Saraceno). Together, MADE UP in the public realm seeks to carve out small moments of wonder amidst the everyday, and remind us that if new realities are forged through ‘making things up’, then present realities too depend on the imagination for their construction.
