Stedelijk Museum

åyr collective

I'd Rather Be Outside

10 - 25 Jun 2017

HOLLAND FESTIVAL: ÅYR COLLECTIVE - I'D RATHER BE OUTSIDE
10 - 25 June 2017

Since 2015, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Holland Festival have been commissioning an artist each year to create a free work of art at Amsterdam's Museumplein. In 2015 they commissioned British artist Liam Gillick to make his largest piece of work to date, the installation All-Imitate-Act, and last year the Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija presented Tomorrow is the Question. This year London based collective åyr come to Amsterdam. Co-commissioned by the Holland Festival and the Stedelijk Museum, I’d Rather Be Outside will consist of a series of full-scale, 3d printed, domestic rooms. The work tackles questions related to the global housing crisis, mass production and the relationship between publicness and individuality.

Life-sized bedrooms open to the public, 3D printed and scattered around Museumplein. The young collective åyr examines contemporary housing with their installation I’d Rather Be Outside. åyr was founded in London in 2014 by four architects with an exhibition called AIRBNB Pavilion. In their work they investigate developments in ownership, privacy and sharing in the domestic space – they have made smart homes and they exhibited in rooms rented on online sharing platforms. This new work on Museumplein was commissioned by Holland Festival and Stedelijk Museum. The printed rooms look like shells that have washed up on a beach. As part of the installation åyr invited Martha Rosler to exibit the work Housing Is a Human Right, a billboard animation first installed in Times Square in 1989, as a comment on the steep rise of homelessness in the United States, still relevant today.

MORE ABOUT ÅYR
åyr, the collective formerly known as AIRBNB Pavilion, is an art collective based in London, active since 2014, whose work focuses on contemporary forms of domesticity. Founded by Fabrizio Ballabio, Alessandro Bava, Luis Ortega Govela and Octave Perrault, the collective was first formed on the occasion of an exhibition during the opening days of the XIV Architecture Biennale in Venice, which took place in apartments rented on Airbnb. The pavilion was an installation in apartments rented online, exhibiting the work of 25 architects and 25 artists.
Fabrizio Ballabio says in frieze magazine: ‘In airbnb, we found a paradigm of how the sharing economy of the internet had a tangible spatial impact. The exhibition was an independent project. It changed its name to åyr in 2015 following legal pressure. åyr tackles the evolution of the contemporary home and its transformations from the fortress of the family to a commodity traded online with performances, site-specific installations, events and writing. Its work focuses on the relationship between objects and their environments, and the effects of the internet on the city. Alessandro Bava: ’A home is no longer solely something that holds your feelings of family, community and security, but becomes a player in the field of global financial speculation.’ Recent exhibitions include the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Home Economics at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale, Home Visit at Museum Ludwig and Interior Therapy at Queer Thoughts New York.
 

Tags: Liam Gillick, Martha Rosler, Rirkrit Tiravanija