Horror in the Modernist Block review: engaging and ‘insidiously unsettling’
Ikon Gallery exhibition explores how modernist buildings became ‘emblems of horror’

Modernist architects were inspired by the “utilitarian dream” of building “machines for living”, said Skye Sherwin in The Guardian. But their buildings would become the stuff of nightmares. By the 1970s, tower blocks and modernist housing schemes had become bleak symbols of “social breakdown”, used as settings for dystopian novels and horror films. In many other countries, meanwhile, modernism became a favoured style of authoritarian regimes.
This exhibition in Birmingham brings together the work of 20 contemporary artists who explore how modernist buildings became “emblems of horror” in the collective imagination. It takes the postwar reconstruction of heavily bombed Birmingham itself as a starting point: in Brutal, a film by the artist NT, ominous music plays over night-time footage of the city’s postwar housing blocks. The show features a mix of video, sculpture, conceptual art and photography: Karim Kal’s photos, for instance, capture social housing on the outskirts of Lyon at night.
There’s “much to recommend” this exhibition, said Will Wiles in Apollo. Highlights include Mies 421 (2010), a video by Maria Taniguchi that leads viewers around the dark and desolate spaces of Mies van der Rohe’s landmark 1929 Barcelona Pavilion. Birmingham artist Richard Hughes contributes a giant sculpture resembling “a Calder-esque mobile”, decorated with “lumps of broken concrete” and “a deflated space hopper”; it projects “an uneasy air of both pleasure and neglect”.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Equally interesting is Sudanese-born artist Ola Hassanain’s video work examining British and Soviet modernist influences on post-independence Khartoum. Closer to home, Ismael Monticelli fields an “absorbing” sculpture “decked with arcane symbols”, in which Birmingham’s notorious Spaghetti Junction interchange leads directly into Brasília, Brazil’s “showpiece modernist capital”.
Yet while the show is “often stimulating”, its “cumulative effect never convinces”. Its scope of reference is “too broad” and its arguments never really add up. Above all, it is curiously lacking in “atmosphere” – a prerequisite for an exhibition about horror.
Nevertheless, this is a “thought-provoking” show, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Roaming the world, it explores the dark underbelly of 20th century hopes and dreams: Shezad Dawood’s “eerie” tapestry depicts an abandoned modernist US embassy in Karachi, while a sculpture by Poland’s Monika Sosnowska resembles a “smashed-up fairground ride” – a “stark, frightening symbol of urban desolation”.
Abbas Zahedi provides a small but “distressingly powerful” piece – a “charred” and “inverted” exit sign that refers to the Grenfell Tower catastrophe. Horror in the Modernist Block may lack “cheap thrills”, but this is an engaging exhibition full of “insidiously unsettling” moments.
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (0121-248 0708, ikon-gallery.org). Until 1 May. Free entry
-
6 laid-back homes for surfers
Feature Featuring a home near a world-renowned surf spot in Hawaii and a house built to withstand the elements in South Carolina
-
Twelfth Night or What You Will: a 'riotous' late-summer jamboree
The Week Recommends Robin Belfield's 'carnivalesque' new staging at Shakespeare's Globe is 'joyfully tongue-in-cheek'
-
Hostage: Netflix's 'fun, fast and brash potboiler'
The Week Recommends Suranne Jones is 'relentlessly defiant' as prime minister Abigail Dalton
-
Music reviews: Chance the Rapper, Cass McCombs, and Molly Tuttle
Feature "Star Line," "Interior Live Oak," and "So Long Little Miss Sunshine"
-
Film reviews: Eden and Honey Don't!
Feature Seekers of a new utopia spiral into savagery and a queer private eye prowls a high-desert town
-
Critics' choice: Three chefs fulfilling their ambitions
Feature Kwame Onwuachi's grand second act, Travis Lett makes a comeback, and Jeff Watson's new Korean restaurant
-
Book reviews: 'The Headache: The Science of a Most Confounding Affliction—and a Search for Relief' and 'Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of "Born to Run"'
Feature The search for a headache cure and revisiting Springsteen's 'Born to Run' album on its 50th anniversary
-
Keith McNally's 6 favorite books that have ambitious characters
Feature The London-born restaurateur recommends works by Leo Tolstoy, John le Carré, and more