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Dar Abu Said

Installation / replica · 2016 · Venice, Italy

A shelter in the Calais migrant camp was recorded by 3D scanning and remade at full scale for the V&A’s A World of Fragile Parts at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. The shelter had been Abu Said’s home for four months at the time of the scan. The installation treats the conservation of the immediate present as political documentation, bringing an improvised, temporary structure into the museum and the Biennale.

Three-dimensional scan of Abu Said’s shelter in Calais
Photogrammetry of the shelter, with the camera positions surrounding it

Conserving the immediate present

The project asks what should be preserved, and whose architecture enters the museum. A temporary home is recorded with the same techniques used to conserve historic monuments. The scan was remade at full scale, CNC-milled in Verolith supplied by Sto. It draws on the museum tradition of casts and copies while bringing the urgent conditions of migration into the Biennale.

For exhibitions, acquisitions and commissions: [email protected].

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Selected works

50 works in 4 files. More to come.

About Sam Jacob

Sam Jacob makes work that explores the strange lives of familiar things. His work draws on the images, objects and fragments of history through which we construct ideas of nature, culture and ourselves.

Across drawings, objects, installations and curatorial projects, he examines how architecture and material things embody social and cultural ideas, how ‘fictions’ become ‘real’, how ideas become things, and how things become ideas.

Collage, copying and processes of reconstruction are central to this practice, which also moves between digital processes and physical materiality. These transformations and translations bring both humour and unease to questions of memory, value and meaning.

Solo exhibitions include Against Nature (2023) and Empire of Ice Cream (2019) at Betts Project, London, and Disappear Here at the RIBA Architecture Gallery (2018). His work has also been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the V&A, MAK Vienna, the National Museum in Oslo, the Graham Foundation in Chicago and Secession, Vienna, and at Manifesta and the Venice and Chicago architecture biennials.

Curatorial projects include A Clockwork Jerusalem, co-curated with Wouter Vanstiphout for the British Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale; The Lie of the Land at MK Gallery; and Pattern as Politics, with Priya Khanchandani, at the 2019 Lisbon Architecture Triennale.

Jacob is a columnist for ArtReview, writes Strangeharvest, and is the author of Make It Real: Architecture as Enactment. He is Professor and Dean of the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Die Angewandte), and directs Sam Jacob Studio, a collaborative architecture and design practice.

For exhibitions, gallery enquiries, acquisitions and commissions, contact [email protected].