Oskar Hansen: OPEN FORM exhibition design, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto

Oskar Hansen: Open Form is a traveling exhibition, present- ed in 2014 at the MACBA in Barcelona. We treat this traveling exhibition as an ongoing research project, and so we take the opportunity for a new context to design it anew for each venue, using different concepts of Hansen’s exhibition design as a basis.

Hansen was a member of the architectural group Team 10, whose theoretical framework, disseminated primarily through teaching and publications, had a profound influence on the development of architectural thought in the second half of the 20th century, primarily in Europe. For Hansen, the role of the architect in shaping the space was limited to the creation of a ‘perceptive background’, with architecture exposing the diversity of activities and Individuals sharing a space. Focusing on process, subjectivity and the creation of a framework for individual expression, Hansen turns architecture into an instru- ment to be transformed by its users and is easily adapted their changing needs.

The primary differentiation and development of this exhibi- tion from that of Open Form in MACBA, is that we are reinter- preting, rather than reconstructing, Hansen’s visual language. We applied his spatial concepts by extrapolating the language from diagrams, and by using the same recipe that he applied in Izmir, we happened to create what Hansen called an Occa- sional Environment.