Mia Sundberg Galleri     Mats Eriksson: Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt  (April 3 - May 9, 2008)

Mia Sundberg Galleri   *** Waiting to be notified of address change *** (March 2009)  Stockholm  Sweden     Tel +46 (0) 8 660 9620 Fax +46 (0) 8 660 9622      www.miasundberggalleri.se

 
  

Press release

 
Mia Sundberg Galleri is proud to present the exhibition Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt by Mats Eriksson. The new book about the photographic project will be presented during the opening of the show.
 
Swedish photographer Mats Eriksson, was born in 1967 in Malmö, Sweden. He has studied at the Malmö Art Academy and at the Glasgow School of Fine Arts. He lives and works in Stockholm. This is his third solo exhibition at Mia Sundberg Galleri.
 
Mats Eriksson’s photographs are acute investigations of manufactured environments, urban landscapes and man-made structures. The socio-political aspects of such environments and surroundings are brought to the fore. His earlier photographs of closed and abandoned institutional buildings in Sweden are a document of the downsizing of the welfare state, the erosion of the Swedish ”Folkhem”. Here we see the inherent conflicts between intention and practical function, idealism and pragmatism.
 
A sense of loss becomes apparent in examining the remnants of a utopian vision, which is offset by the knowledge of the authoritarian excesses that utopian visions can lead to. The ideal of Modernism as a liberating force, a source of order, is at odds with the realities of its misuse within oppressive systems.
 
Mats Eriksson’s new series of photographs is entitled Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt. The artist explores the town of New Gurna, created by Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, situated south of Cairo, between Luxor and the Valley of the kings. In the post-war decades, Hassan Fathy designed model cities in sun-dried adobe brick to solve housing problems for the country’s poor and traditionally nomadic population.
 
”At all costs, I have always wanted to avoid the attitude too often adopted by professional architects and planners: that the community has nothing worth the professionals’ consideration, that all its problems can be solved by the importation of the sophisticated urban approach to building. If possible, I want to bridge the gulf that separates folk architecture from architect’s architecture. Unhappily, the modern architect of the Third World accepts every facility offered to him by modern technology, with no thought of its effect on the complex web of his culture. Unaware that civilization is measured by what one contributes to culture, not by what one takes from others, he continues to draw upon the works of Western architects in Europe and North America, without assessing the value of his own heritage.” Hassan Fathy
 
The projects that Fathy embarked upon still stand, crumbling but inhabited remnants, the remains of a potential alternative to the adoption of western modernism. Mats Eriksson’s photographs capture the intense colours and contrasts of the desert settlements and the sense of tranquillity mixed with melancholy that seems to reign. The photographs are formally beautiful documents of an architectural vision centred not on an inflexible all-consuming globalism but on the dynamic possibilities of the local and the place-specific.