Office Works

Office Works is a series of images made in decommissioned headquarters of various corporations that have since moved on.

The air conditioning is still running. Nothing else is. It’s unsettling. Office Works is a series of images made in decommissioned headquarters of various corporations that have since moved on. Andrew Curtis focuses on the building’s tired interiors and breathing apparatus. Innards, guts, lungs. It’s impossible not to anthropomorphise. In three photographs: stains, leaks and seepage; eviscerated pipes. If this is a body, it’s not healthy.

Not at all. These 1980s office complexes have reached obsolescence. Whereas Curtis’ earlier work has staged artistic interventions into the decline of manufacturing industries, or explored sunless visions twisted around material byproducts of the construction sector, Office Works looks at the contemporary knowledge economy through its forsaken artefacts. Scheduled for demolition, these offices’ future redevelopment as apartments suggests another stage in the economic cycle.

For now though, Curtis rummages in the ruins. But this is not grainy documentary photography: the artist has intervened in these spaces to exaggerate their post-industrial superficiality. Attacking walls with crowbars, setting off fire extinguishers. ‘Pulling ceiling tiles out reveals the ducts moving in eerie ways that complement the peculiar feeling of a hundred empty offices’, he says. He lights things accordingly, his perversion of a slick, corporate aesthetic belying what’s underneath. Not for nothing does Curtis evoke the fluorescent noir of Michael Mann’s 1986 psychological horror Manhunter, a film released in the same era as the buildings in these images were unveiled.

Another reference point is the ‘broken future’ of the melancholic space station in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 science-fiction masterpiece, Solaris. To make sense of Office Works, that broken future must be our own. We look back on the current era with a sense it has already failed. Except it hasn’t – everything is going according to plan in these images. Corporate profit-and-loss gives way to another form of speculation, the property market. A bleak view best filtered through pastel-coloured vertical blinds.