Slayer Pavilion is an art space created in response to the prevailing art biennial and art fair cultures. Conceived as an autonomous space that will appear within these pre-existing environments the Pavilion builds on the ideas of KurtSchwitters and Gregor Schneider in creating an evolving structure that, as an entirety, will only exist in non-space (it’s ‘parts’ emerging only transiently as a numbered series of ‘Rooms’ that through time will build into a ‘permanent’, documented collection of the works curated and created by the artists involved). Each new ‘Room’ will help to further define the theoretical architecture: it’s totality only viewable in blueprint form.
Slayer Pavilion is in this sense a museum of sorts defined and made free by its lack of a physical structure. Far from beingtravelling exhibitions, the temporary presentations of the Rooms are momentary manifestations of a fractured whole, allowing for a glimpse of a structure that is otherwise impossible to enter. It is a museum of ‘Transient Permanence’, creating its dialogue through expansion and path of movement rather than through the juxtaposition of single works. As such, the content of the Rooms are neither individual nor group exhibitions but temporary and freestanding fractions of the whole.
Slayer Pavilion was founded by David Dorrell, Melissa Frost and Mihda Koray who work collectively and simultaneously as artists and curators of the project. Taking the view that ideologies are in themselves a series of transient permanencies and drawing inspiration from forgotten or marginalised histories and pop cultures Dorrell, Frost and Koray offer the intrinsic paradoxes of Slayer Pavilion as a lens for artist and audience to consider questions of freedom, authenticity and control in a time still dominated by notions of ‘the Post’ and the struggle to understand the ‘meaning’ of leaving the 20th Century. Finding ourselves now at the uneasy junction in which our ‘present’, projected in numerous media of the last century as the ‘not too distant future’, now constitutes ‘the future that never happened’, Slayer Pavilion seeks to examine the margins of our culture so that we can live a ‘modern future’ where, in the words of Raymond Williams “community may be imagined again”.