Cyprien Gaillard 'Dunepark'

Bunker project with the Foundation Atlantikwall Museum Scheveningen
February 21 thru March 29, 2009

Location: Bosjes van Poot, corner Nieboerweg / Houtrustweg in Scheveningen
How to get there: click here

Excavation progress: click here
Reburial of the bunker: click here
More on the exhibition Beton Belvedere: click here

The exhibition ‘Beton Belvedere' by the French artist Cyprien Gaillard is accompanied by an ambitious project in public space. Gaillard's site-specific project ‘Dunepark' is the excavation of a World War II bunker currently buried in a hill overlooking the beach of Scheveningen and the neighbourhood of Duindorp.

This is an area already undergoing drastic transformation as the existing communities and industries are displaced to make way for new housing developments. Gaillard's project comments obliquely on this process of gentrification and the way in which outmoded architecture is buried or hidden beneath new layers of urban development. This work, titled ‘Dunepark' - a rough translation of its location - can be seen as the embodiment of the ‘Bunker Archeology' carried out by the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio in his eponymous 1975 book and exhibition. For Gaillard, the physical process of excavating is a form of negative sculpting. He sees this submerged bunker as a buried readymade. With the help of large earth-moving equipment and volunteers of the Stichting Atlantikwall Museum Scheveningen, Gaillard will dig out this massive form to reveal it in all its brutalist glory, before recovering it once more.
* The bunker itself is not open to the public.

For more information on Cyprien Gaillard:
click here.
For more information on Zoë  Gray:
click here.

Photo series of excavation by Robin de Goede in Flickr

Special thanks:
‘Dunepark' is organized in collaboration with the Stichting Atlantikwall Museum Scheveningen. The bunker excavation is made possible by the generous support of City of The Hague (Culture and Finances), Vestia Den Haag Scheveningen, CulturesFrance Paris and Fonds 1818 The Hague.

Dunepark is part of the theme program 'nu monument'.

22 Feb '09 - 29 Mar '09
Bosjes van Poot, corner Nieboerweg - Houtrustweg in Scheveningen