Piccadilly Community Centre is a sardonic take on the motivations behind the Big Society
On the site of a former bank in Piccadilly designed by Edwin Lutyens, a pop-up community centre has sprung from nowhere.
It houses a money-lending booth, a prayer room, a canteen, a bar, and a charity shop with a Conservative Party desk, among much else. Daily activities at the centre include hula hooping and fencing for pensioners.
The sheer absurdity of this latter activity suggests all is not what it seems: the centre is in fact an immaculately detailed installation by Swiss provocateur Christoph Büchel, who has transformed the Hauser & Wirth gallery's HQ.
Büchel's fictional world gets stranger the more you explore. The basement houses a caretaker's office leading to a bed surrounded by porn and used tissues. In the attic is a squatters' lair, with daytime TV crackling away amid dirty beds and placards from anti-government demonstrations. The Zumba dancers I witnessed seemed to be authentic, and genuinely enjoying themselves, oblivious to participating in Büchel's elaborate mise en scène.
But the joke is not on them. In using a former bank, with a permanently empty money-lending desk at its front, Büchel's work is not a satire on community itself but a sardonic take on the motivations behind the Big Society.
Until July 30 (020 7255 9855, piccadillycommunitycentre.org)
Piccadilly Community Centre
Hauser & Wirth
W1
