“The Vincent Award 2014”

The recipient of the 2014 Vincent Award—a fifty thousand euro prize given out every two years to a European artist—was the French-Albanian Anri Sala. All five nominees, though, submitted installations for an exhibition here. Three of them, Pierre Huyghe, Manfred Pernice, and Willem de Rooij, take a step too far from reality into the animal kingdom, an abstract formal construction, and a very hermetic view of a Mondrian painting, respectively. But Gillian Wearing’s and Sala’s pieces are of particular topical interest as they both deal with communities struggling to cope with their environment.

Sala projects on both sides of a wall-size screen two of his films, Le Clash, 2010, and Tlatelolco Clash, 2011, addressing the current reevaluation of modernist architecture from the sixties and seventies—also a theme at the last Venice Architecture Biennale. In Tlatelolco Clash, inhabitants of a Mexico City Brutalist-style residential area each in turn play The Clash song “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” on a street organ, as if contemplating their directions in life, while in Le Clash people quietly go about their business against the backdrop of an abandoned cultural center. Wearing takes a more prosaic stance with her film Bully, 2010, in which a role-play concerning the effect of such abuse is acted out. Perfectly produced, her short narrative possesses the grittiness of a docudrama.

Wearing comes off as emphatically rubbing your nose in the misery of British housing estates while Sala instead leaves the viewer with questions about community and the implications of living with architecture that, despite its outer beauty, doesn’t quite live up to its ideals.