![\"\"](\"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Katrina-Palmer-Installation-View-A-Tale-of-a-Tub_-1230x1721.png\")
The artist materialises the institutional tensions behind the act of demolition
\n\n\n\nWhen I think of demolition in art I think of Gordon Matta-Clark; of the heroic cuts he made into buildings during the late 1970s and subsequently photographed. Or the subtler, institutional-critical demolition by Michael Asher of an internal wall at Claire Copley Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1974, erasing the division between exhibition space and office. Katrina Palmer’s proposed ten-step demolition of A Tale of A Tub’s front-facing external wall (each step outlined on a largescale notice, Demolition Billboard [all works 2026], erected on the inside of that wall) is closer to Asher’s example but more radical, insofar as the wall she seeks to remove has heritage status – the institution was originally a bathhouse serving the 1922 Justus van Effencomplex housing estate, a monument of social housing.
\n\n\n\nThe proposal tips into absurdity, however, given Palmer’s implementation of a bureaucratic process that would make a ‘controlled explosive demolition’ unlikely: a series of three Consultation Meetings (listed among artworks on the exhibition handout but to which the viewer is not otherwise privy) invite the institution’s stakeholders to debate her proposal. These meetings prompt us to question participatory art’s assumption that the audience will affirm both the artist’s vision and the institution as complements of each other, creating an impasse. Meanwhile, a number of other works anticipate the demolition’s approval: Another Way is Possible consists of a metal screen blocking the institution’s main entrance, a sign rerouting visitors towards a usable side door; Institution Door turns the now-removed entrance door into sculpture – laid flat on a house-mover’s blanket on the ground floor, it is to be walked around rather than through. Also on the ground floor are Props, a series of nine builders props supporting the ceiling.
\n\n\n\nNodding towards relational aesthetics, Palmer’s hospitable offerings include using a portion of the exhibition budget to waive the usual €2 entry fee, and making drinks in the café free. Chairs, on the ground floor, in a waiting room-style arrangement of three, have their backs to the wall slated for demolition. On the mezzanine, chairs are arranged around tables on which are copies of Palmer’s Notes Towards a Paranoid Construction, a short story staging an encounter between an artist, K – the initial collapsing together Katrina and various Kafka protagonists – and Michiel, a Justus van Effencomplex resident sharing the first name of the housing estate’s architect. K crawls under a desk and carries it, tortoise-like, into Michiel’s home on the estate; he soon finds it burdensome, but the art institution insists that it remain, invoking the effort it cost K to deliver. Michiel then pens a letter of complaint, which rapidly turns into a story involving two bomb enthusiasts targeting a men-only club, government offices, schools, then ‘anything with a wall’. The anarchism of their actions, ‘determined to raise consciousness regarding prevailing violences’, creates a foil for Palmer’s suggestion that art which puts too much store in negotiation risks a farcical state of inertia.
\n\n\n\nParanoid Construction itself is a short silent video, projected onto a basement wall. It opens with an aerial view of Palmer’s wooden desk, topped by a pile of white paper, then cuts to a second image of the desk, now covered with a house-mover’s blanket, a pen and paper placed on top. Besides the bright, intermittent appearance of an X, the rest of the video is rather dark, shot beneath the desk and showing the artist’s handwriting and redacting. We also see a blue-and-white-striped bedsheet, and black tape applied to the paper, forming lines resembling those in the 11 drawings elsewhere in the basement. The real actions of the video merge with the fiction of Notes Towards a Paranoid Construction: after Michiel’s complaint is rejected by the institution, he finds the space beneath the desk K has given him to comprise ‘a small and shady den’ and ‘crawls into the space, taking the writing, all of it, with him’. Thus demolition remains imagined, but its institutional tensions become material.
\n\n\n\nKatrina Palmer: Four-story, Flat-roofed Complex in a Somewhat Expressionist Style, at A Tale of A Tub, Rotterdam, 21 February – 24 May
\n\n\n\nFrom the Summer 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
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