‘The Goldfinger Project’ explores the social utopian ideology and reality of the Brutalist architectural aesthetic, documenting both fictional and factual narratives from one of Brutalism’s key exponents and a leading figure of the Modern movement - Erno Goldfinger.
Goldfinger’s architectural legacies, key moments from his life and the architectural world are presented by Arni Haraldsson in the form of photography, film footage, historical documentation, popular cultural memorabilia, sound and resourced information. Featuring material from such diverse sources as BBC news reels 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 latest work in his investigation into the architectural language of the High Modernist era. This ongoing project of photographing and collecting material as a means to explore architecture and its cultural legacy has taken him around the globe 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 the fading relics of High Modernist architecture as a means of reading recent historical change and exploring their symbolic complexity and status as monuments and utopian models. Arni Haraldsson’s work will be exhibited in EAST International 2007.
