“The Surreal House”

“The Surreal House” planned by Carmody Groarke, is being shown in Barbican Art Gallery between 10 June and 12 September, which explores the relevance of dreams and desires for houses as well as their importance with different artistic forms such as paintings, films, photographs, installations and architecture models. The exhibition concentrates the works of first generation surrealists (Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti and Rene Magritte), contemporary artists (Louise Bourgeois, Sarah Lucas), film-makers (Maya Deren, Jean Cocteau, Andrei Tarkovsky and Jan Svankmajer) and architects (Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas).

The over 150 extraordinary works reflect the comprehension of surrealists who have attempted to integrate the reality with the Subconscious and the experience of dreams in houses. For surrealists, house is “our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the world” (Bachelard, 1958), which totally has subverted the definition of those in modernism that the house is “a machine for living in” (Le Corbusier, 1923).

The exhibition has been laid out on two levels, which likes a big house concluding all functions of living. On the lower lever, visitors would continuously traverse a series of mysterious rooms those have their own themes, which inspires them with imagination of domestic interior space and subconscious desire about habitation. These Works is describing various dreams for visitors by objects, images and voices to prove the relevance of dreams and human appetence because “Only when people are sleeping, dreams can help you make it realize. As a result, the interpretation of dreams is the best way to interpret people’s subconsciousness.” (Freud, 1900).The upper lever is displaying the dialogue between surreal art and architecture, which is the main purpose of the exhibition that arouses the thought about how house can become human’s stage for living in. Or, perhaps the house is the “theatre of the domestic” and a real place where the human or their spirit live in.

It is worth mentioning that the exhibition has been opened with “Priere de toucher”, 1947, by Marcel Duchamp(1887-1968) that is a nipple resembled a doorbell and ended in the last film of Russian film-maker Anderei Tarkovsky(1932-1986) before he died, “The Sacrifice”,1986. In this film, the protagonist lighted his house that signified everything he holds dear, which impresses visitors as being solemn and stirring; besides, it expresses the film-maker’s deep trepidation for human.