Cloud Studies at Open House Melbourne

Screening throughout the weekend at The Capitol, RMIT University, a visually spectacular, art deco cinema designed to evoke a multi-coloured crystalline cave, Forensic Architecture’s Cloud Studies (2021) draws attention to architecture’s gaseous state by investigating different chemical compounds released into the air by manmade events.

This year, Open House Melbourne (OHM) is pleased to present a curated exhibition titled Take Hold of the Clouds in partnership with Monash University. Take Hold of the Clouds brings together cross-disciplinary creative practitioners from the visual arts, architecture, design, sound and film to make an installation or creative work in response to sites they have selected, ranging from buildings to urban landscapes to community spaces, as part of the flagship OHM 2022 July Weekend.

Beyond simply placing artworks in buildings, the exhibition—distributed across seven different sites throughout Naarm Melbourne—stages a series of thoughtful encounters between site-specific and temporal creative works and architecture. Each practitioner has responded to both form and context, adding a new layer to how we understand these buildings and spaces in relation to the world around us.

To this end, the creative practitioners draw our attention to previously invisible connections, stories and issues implicit in these urban spaces: the unbuilt as well as the built; architecture as porous and leaky; bodies and histories rendered invisible or obsolete by buildings; progressive forms of architecture to build community; the natural world in relation to the built environment and the atmospheric effects of man-made processes.

Importantly, by using the city as an exhibition space rather than a traditional gallery, Take Hold of the Clouds models high-impact yet sustainable and resource-sensitive exhibition-making, and supports the production of curated projects that are light in footprint.

Take Hold of the Clouds is conceived by Tara McDowell, Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash Art, Design and Architecture, and co-curated with Fleur Watson, Open House Melbourne’s Executive Director.