The catalogue was published 2009 on the occasion of the exhibition Transitory Objects, which proposed to look at architectural objects outside the context of their production, placing them in the field of aesthetics, we do not suggest an arbitrary reading. Instead, understanding their specific mode of production and consider their potentiality of meaning within the sociopolitical conditions under which subjectivity is “produced.”

In past years Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary has acquired architectural objects as part of its collection of contemporary art, but more importantly it has also produced and supported full-scale architectural projects within the experimental parameters and settings of art-related productions. In the context of projects such as The Morning Line by aranda/lasch and Matthew Ritchie, Your black horizon Art Pavilion by David Adjaye and Olafur Eliasson, or R&Sie(n)’s concept for thegardenofearthlydelights, “architecture” has shifted from its proper place of production and reception, as well as from its status as heteronomous object. This conceptual shift not only represents an effect specific to the art context but also retraces the processes and production logics of a contemporary “visual industry” that penetrates and interweaves all aspects of today’s cultural production. Within this medial setting—which folds together production, distribution, and consumption— architectural objects have become figures of display and exchange value, as well as protagonists in the scenario of aesthetic experience. Having assumed a market-oriented and institutional status, they circulate within the economy of art-world discourse.

Transitory Objects takes up these experimental conditions of shifting disciplinary ground and their instrumental effects. It critically engages with an understanding of aesthetic experience often claimed as a dynamics of ambiguity, contingency, and uncertainty in order to draw a conflictual space that both connects and separates the architectural project and the artwork. 

With works by Alisa Andrasek / BIOTHING, Hernan Diaz Alonso / Xefirotarch, Matthew Ritchie with Aranda\Lasch and Arup AGU, John Bock, Dan Flavin, Rodney Graham, Florian Hecker, Nikolaus Hirsch & Michel Müller in collaboration with the Cybermohalla Ensemble, Greg Lynn FORM, David Maljković, László Moholy-Nagy, Olaf Nicolai, Neri Oxman MATERIALECOLOGY, R&Sie(n) / François Roche and Stéphanie Lavaux, Bojan Šarčević, Fred Sandback, Francesca Woodman, Cerith Wyn Evans.