Top

Yasmeen Lari. Architecture for the Future
edited by Angelika Fitz, Elke Krasny, Marvi Mazhar
and Architekturzentrum Wien
MIT Press 2023

A rich exploration of the extraordinary life and work of celebrated architect Yasmeen Lari, winner of the 2023 RIBA Royal Gold Medal.

After more than three decades as a renowned global architect, Yasmeen Lari, the first woman to open her own architecture firm in Pakistan in 1964, developed Zero Carbon Architecture, which unites ecological and social justice. This volume, edited by Angelika Fitz, Elke Krasny, and Marvi Mazhar, presents Lari’s trajectory from exemplary modernist to zero carbon revolutionary, with a focus on her remarkable contributions to the global architectural movement to decarbonize and decolonize. The book includes extensive photographs, drawings, and plans from Lari’s archive, most of which have not previously been shown or published.

Lari’s architectural thinking and activism have always gone beyond the quest for a singular built solution. Rather, she strategically plans systemic approaches and solutions, be it for housing, a heritage foundation, or zero-carbon shelters with communities at risk. Original essays from diverse international contributors contextualize Lari’s work; investigate architecture and the postimperial, postcolonial, and postpartition condition; and examine the intersections of architecture and human rights, climate change, decolonization, gender, care, activism, and vernacular innovation. More than a tribute to Yasmeen Lari’s extraordinary career, this volume brings her legacy forward and shows how to create change today

Contributors:
Abira Ashfaq, Cassandra Cozza, Angelika Fitz, Runa Kahn, Anne Karpf, Elke Krasny, Marvi Mazhar, Chris Moffat, Anila Naeem, Raquel Rolnik, Helen Thomas, Rafia Zakaria

–––

Paperback
288 pp., 7 x 9 in, 180 figs.
ISBN: 9780262546096
Published: May 9, 2023
Publisher: The MIT Press

Yasmeen-Lari_Architecture-for-the-Future.-Edited-by-Angelika-Fitz,-Elke-Krasny,-Marvi-Mazhar,-Book-design-by-alexander-ach-schuh_

Curating with Care
edited by Elke Krasny and Lara Perry
London: Routledge 2023

This book presents over 20 authors’ reflections on ‘curating care’ – and presents a call to give curatorial attention to the primacy of care for all life and for more ‘caring curating’ that responds to the social, ecological and political analysis of curatorial caregiving.

Social and ecological struggles for a different planetary culture based on care and respect for the dignity of life are reflected in contemporary curatorial practices that explore human and non-human interdependence. The prevalence of themes of care in curating is a response to a dual crisis: the crisis of social and ecological care that characterizes global politics and the professional crisis of curating under the pressures of the increasingly commercialized cultural landscape. Foregrounding that all beings depend on each other for life and survival, this book collects theoretical essays, methodological challenges and case studies from curators working in different global geographies to explore the range of ways in which curatorial labour is rendered as care.

Practising curators, activists and theorists situate curatorial labour in the context of today’s general care crisis. This volume answers to the call to more fully understand how their transformative work allows for imagining the future of bodily, social and environmental care and the ethics of interdependency differently.

–––

Table of Contents

Elke Krasny and Lara Perry: Introduction

Part I. Caring Curating

Françoise Vergès: Curatorial Labour and Decolonial Feminism

Bruxas Bruxas Arts Collective: Get Bodied: Inverting the Witch to Summon a New Commons

Care beyond Curation: A Conversation with Lauren Craig. Interview by Racha Baraka Pauline

De Souza: Transcultural Care and the Cultural Sector in the United Kingdom

Helen Kaplinsky: Caring for ‘range-ful’ identities in the work of Danielle Brathwaite Shirley

Mirella Maria: Decolonial and Heritage Practices in the Context of Current Global Challenges. Quilombola Museology and Digital Technologies in Brazilian Community Museums

Sophie Lingg: Caring Curating and Social Media

Berit Fischer: A Laboratory of Care. Active Micropolitics, Joyfulness and Affectivity

Joulia Strauss: Avtonomi Akadimia. Curating becomes Curing

Alexandra Kokoli: Care, Aftercare, and the Work of Transmission: Learning from Greenham Common

Eliana Otta: Caring for Mourning, Working with Loss. Curating, Listening, and Attending to the Sacred in Peruvian Highlands and Forests

Elke Krasny: Care, Thought, Being: Curating with a Wounded Planet

Part II. Curating Care

Caroline Gausden, Kirsten Lloyd, Nat Raha, and Catherine Spencer: Curating Forms of Care in Art and Activism: A Roundtable on Life Support

Helena Reckitt: From Coping to Curious: Unlearning and Reimagining Curatorial Habits of Care

Sascia Bailer: Care for Caregivers: Curating against the Care Crisis

Jacqueline Millner and Zsuzsanna Zsoboszlay: Cultivating Care Ethics and the Minor Gesture in Curatorial and Research Practices

Jenny Richards: ‘Do what you do best and outsource the rest’ – Curatorial Lessons within Cultures of Outsourcing

Katja Kobolt, Petja Grafenauer, and Brigita Miloš: The Platform of Care: Collective Curatorial Modes of the n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fictions platform

Claudia Lomoschitz: Curating Queer Nursing: the performance installation PARTUS Gyno Bitch Tits

Magdalena Kallenberger (MATERNAL FANTASIES collective): Curating a Collective Body: a Non-Idealized Concept of Care

Johanna Braun: Spellbound. Witchcraft Activism as Caring Curatorial Practice

Zahra Khan: Curating Aliveness. Engaging with Ecologies

Hansel Sato: La escuela del buen vivir/ The school of good life: counteracting the imperial mode of living

–––

ISBN 9781032069913
328 Pages 15 B/W Illustrations
Published March 15, 2023 by Routledge

Curating-with-Care_Elke-Krasny,-Lara-Perry_

Curating as Feminist Organizing
edited by Elke Krasny and Lara Perry
London: Routledge 2023

What makes curating feminist organizing? How do curators relate to contemporary feminist concerns in their local conditions and the globalized artworld? The book brings together twenty curatorial case studies from diverse regions of the globe.

Reflecting their own curatorial projects or analyzing feminist-inspired exhibitions, the authors in this book elaborate feminist curating as that which is inspired to challenge gender politics not only within but also beyond the doors of the museum and gallery. Connecting their wider feminist politics to their curatorial practices, the book provides case studies of curatorial practice that address the legacies of racialized and ethnic violence, including colonialism; which seek to challenges the state’s regulation of citizenship and sexuality; and which realize the drive for economic justice in the organizations and roles in which curators work. The settings in which this work is done range from university art galleries to artist-run spaces and educational or activist programmes.

This collection will be enjoyed by those studying and researching curating, exhibitions, socially and ecologically engaged contemporary art practices, and feminist transnational movements in diverse geographic contexts. The essays are of relevance to practicing curators, critical cultural practitioners, and artists.

–––––

Table of Contents

Introduction: On the Feminist Work of Organizing
Elke Krasny and Lara Perry 

Part I: Colonial Wounds and Transformative Healing

1. The Museum and the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief, Planetary Mourning, Healing Feminist Curating
Elke Krasny

2. Resisting Extractivism of Wisdom in the Feminist Curatorial Exercise
Emilia Quiñones-Otal

3. Feminist Curating as Storytelling and Mothering: The Work of D and Kate Harding
Tara McDowell

4. Curating Feminine Alterity: Deconstructing Feminist Strategies by Contemporary Iranian Women Artists
Katy Shahandeh

5. Geographies of Community Care: Cultural Spaces curated by Black Womxn in Copenhagen and Vienna
Teju Adisa-Farrar

6. In the Spirit of Futura: Daily Practices and Challenges of Producing and Maintaining a Feminist Art Space
Katharina Koch

7. Rewriting the Manifesto and Filipina Feminist Publishing
Faye Cura

Part II. State Hegemony and Resistant Communities

8.  Human Rights, Memory and Contemporary Artistic Practice in Turkey
Eylem Ertürk

9.  Stretching the Institution, Cultivating Interdependency: Feminist Curating as Political Organizing in the Post-Crisis Spanish State
Carlota Mir

10. Radical Geographies of Feminist Curating within the Post-Yugoslav Space
Jelena Petrović

11. Summoning the Witches of the Past: Curatorial Research on Witchcraft in Art & Activism
Katharina Brandl

12. Encounters with Asian Diasporic Identities: The Exhibition Neither Black / Red / Yellow Nor Woman at the Times Art Center Berlin
Julia Hartmann

13. The Vulva Case: Feminist Art, Digital Obscenity, and Censorship in Japan
Hitomi Hasegawa

14. On the Production and Challenging of Sexual Norms through the Art Institution: A Viennese Case Study
Juliane Saupe

15. Searching for Ann(e) : Digital Fan Curation and the Expansion of the Queer Heritage Landscape
Katelyn Williams 

16. On Common Spaces, Affinity and the Problem of a Torn Social Fabric
Dana Daymand and Nika Dubrovsky

Part III. Labour Injustice and the Politics of Solidarity 

17. Curating as a Collective Process: Feminist, Curatorial, and Educational Perspectives
Dorothee Richter

18. Your Hands in My Shoes: Reorganizing La Galerie, Centre for Contemporary Art in Noisy-le-Sec
Émilie Renard and Vanessa Desclaux

19. Objects of Desire: Curating Sex Worker Art in the 21st Century
Lena Chen

20. Whose Visibility? Labour Divides, Care Politics, and Strategies of Solidarity in the Art Field
Angela Dimitrakaki

Index

–––––

ISBN 9781032065304
310 Pages 22 B/W Illustrations

Curating-as-Feminist-Organizing_Elke-Krasny,-Lara-Perry_

A curatorial exhibition, research and education project

Opening | March 10, 2016, 7.00 p.m.
Exhibition dates | March 11–May 16,  2016
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, x hibit, Schillerplatz 3 1010 Vienna

Opening hours Tue–Sun, 10.00 a.m.–6.00 p.m., admission free
Special opening hours March 28 and May 1, 5, 16, 10.00 a.m.–6.00 p.m.

Curators | Elke Krasny and Barbara Mahlknecht

Historical Research | Ina Markova, Rosemarie Burgstaller and Sophie Bitter-Smirnov, Assistance | Eva Maria Eisner, Exhibition Graphics| Alexander Ach Schuh

With contributions by Tal Adler/Friedemann Derschmidt/ Elisabeth Samsonow/Karin Schneider/ Anna Szöke/Niko Wahl, Anna Artaker, Eva Blimlinger, Ramesch Daha, Zsuzsi Flohr/Benjy Fox-Rosen/Eduard Freudmann/Eva Reinold/Luisa Ziaja, Lena Rosa Händle, Minna L. Henriksson, Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski, Gila Kolb, Martin Krenn, Ina Markova/Rosemarie Burgstaller/Sophie Bitter-Smirnov, Verena Pawlowsky, Birgit Peter, Sabine Plakolm-Forsthuber, Suely Rolnik, Dirk Rupnow, Hansel Sato, Anna Schürch, Sekretariat für Geister, Archivpolitiken und Lücken (Nina Höchtl and Julia Wieger), Bernadette Settele, Nora Sternfeld, Imayna Caceres/Pêdra Costa/Verena Melgarejo Weinandt from Wer hat Angst vor dem Museum?

Elke-Krasny-u.-Barbara-Mahlknecht,-Unheimliche-Materialien.-Gruendungsmomente-der-Kunsterziehung,-2016_Foto-Lisa-Rastl_(c)Akademie-der-bildenden-Kueste-Wien_990x600

Elke Krasny und Barbara Mahlknecht, Unheimliche Materialien. Gründungsmomente der Kunsterziehung, 2016

On 9 July 1941, the decree of the Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture in Berlin went out to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna to establish the “Master School for Art Education and the Training of Secondary School Art Teachers.” 75 years later, the history of the founding of today’s Institute for Education in the Arts remains largely inscrutable. This is the starting point for the curatorial exhibition, research and education project, Uncanny Materials: Founding Moments of Art Education. The exhibition shows how historians, artists and curators work with archival materials and raise questions of the politics of history and memory.

During the rectorate of Alexander Popp (Nazi Party member since 1935), teacher training at the Master School for Art Education under the leadership of Ernst August Mandelsloh (Nazi Party member since 1932) was based upon the ideological foundations of Nazism. Philosophy and ideology were required examination subjects. The formation of Nazi art education is documented in the following materials from the University Archives of the Academy: personal status sheets, lists of students, course syllabi, examination regulations, minutes of professorial council meetings, budgets, master school prizes and material procurement lists.

Study at the Master School for Art Education included artistic subjects, electives, crafts and academic subjects. Subjects included painting, graphic arts, drawing and watercolor landscapes, general history, history of German literature, crafts and needlework, as well as the didactics of drawing, art history and art apprecia­tion. The Seminar Kunst­betrachtung (“Art Appreciation Seminar”) stamp makes it clear that the magazine Die Kunst im Dritten Reich (“Art in the Third Reich”), part of the holdings of the Academy library, had been used in the “training of art educators.” The editor of this magazine, which was published by the Nazi Party publishing house for the “monitoring of the entire spiritual and ideological training and education of the NSDAP,” was Alfred Rosenberg.

Based on 1941 documents of the University Archives of the Academy, the archival installation by curators Elke Krasny and Barbara Mahlknecht shows the personnel, physical, structural and ideological institu­tionalization of art education.

In 1941, the Nazi regime began planning the “Final Solution” and the systematic murder of Jews, Roma, Sinti, prisoners of war and political opponents. The German Luftwaffe attacked British cities. German troops marched into Greece and Yugoslavia. The German Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union. Theaters of war like Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, China, Japan, Thailand, Burma, Indochina and the Philippines, as well as the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, the entry of the USA into the war and the war declarations by Latin American countries illustrate the global dimen­sion of World War II in the year 1941.

For the artworks, the year 1941 is an essential reference point. Many of the activists and artists in this exhibition are former students of the Academy or work here today as instructors. The works articulate interventions in the memory of institutions, make reference to the normalization and disciplining of bodies through education, trace lesbian life during the Nazi regime, show the political involvement of women with Nazism and reflect current changes in “multidirectional memory” (Michael Rothenberg) as well as the importance of “migrants’ situated knowledge” (Ayşe Güleç) for the politics of history.

Artists: Anna Artaker, Ramesch Daha, Zsuzsi Flohr/Eduard Freudmann mit Benjy Fox-Rosen, Lena Rosa Händle, Minna L. Henriksson, ­Hansel Sato, Sekretariat für Geister, Archivpolitiken und Lücken (Nina Höchtl und Julia Wieger) und Imayna Caceres/Pêdra Costa/Verena Melgarejo Weinandt von Wer hat Angst vor dem Museum?

Anna-Artaker,-KOMMENTIERTES-JAHRBUCH-1941,-2016_Foto-Lisa-Rastl_(c)Akademie-der-bildenden-Kuenste-Wien_990

Anna Artaker, KOMMENTIERTES JAHRBUCH 1941, 2016  (detail) 

Lena-Rosa-Haendle,-Maedchen-unter-Baeumen,-2016_Foto-Lisa-Rastl_(c)Akademie-der-bildenden-Kuenste-Wien_990

 

Lena Rosa Händle, Mädchen unter Bäumen, 2016

Ramesch-Daha,-Unlimited-History,-2013_Foto-Lisa-Rastl_(c)Akademie-der-bildenden-Kuenste-Wien_990

Ramesch Daha, Unlimited History, 2013 (Installation view) 

Zsuzsi-Flohr-und-Eduard-Freudmann,-Ein-Stein-steht-hier.-Formationen-des-Erinnerns-1949–,-2016,_Foto-Lisa-Rastl_(c)Akademie-der-bildenden-Künste-Wien_990

Zsuzsi Flohr und Eduard Freudmann, Ein Stein steht hier. Formationen des Erinnerns 1949–, 2016 (Installation view, detail)

Hansel-Sato,-Parallaxe,-2016_Foto-Lisa-Rastl_(c)Akademie-der-bildenden-Kuenste-Wien_990

Hansel Sato, Parallaxe, 2016 (Installation view, detail)

Minna-L.-Henriksson,-Hidden,-2012_2013_Foto-Lisa-Rastl_(c)Akademie-der-bildenden-Kuenste-Wien_475

Minna L. Henriksson, Hidden, 2012/2013 (Installation view, detail)

[All photographs by by Lisa-Rastl © Akademie der bildenden Kueste, Wien]

On April 20 and 21, 2016, an international symposium with lectures, talks, and workshops will explore issues of institutional memory, National Socialist educational policy, the connections between politics of remembrance and artistic practices and question critically hegemonic histories in the field of art education.

Program

Wed, March 16, 2016, 4:00 p.m., x hibit
A Look Back into the Museum
Performance lecture with Imayna Caceres/Pêdra Costa/Verena Melgarejo Weinandt from Wer hat Angst vor dem Museum? (English)

A performative reflection on the role of the museum, its relation to historical wounds, othering, and dehumanization; and what is the role that the art education institution can have in breaking with historical continuities?

Tue, April 5, 2016, 1:30 to 5:30 p.m., x hibit
In Haunted Archives: (Post-)National Socialist Times, Decolonial Futures
Secretariat for Ghosts, Archival Politics, and Gaps (Nina Höchtl and Julia Wieger) Workshop (English)

By addressing the archive as a medium we attempt to work through its im/materiality. We invite participants to question the currency of National Socialism, colonialism and (de)coloniality in relation to specific archival materials from two rather different archives: the Archive of the Austrian Association of Women Artists VBKÖ and the University Archives of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, both haunted by National Socialism and coloniality. These archives hold documents evincing the institutions’ national socialist involvements as well as pointing towards traces of coloniality. At the same time, they bear omissions that make it necessary to read into their gaps. The workshop aims to address questions such as: How could we engage with the archival materials in order to examine the constellations between National Socialism, colonialism and coloniality? Could the analysis of said constellations help to explore possible forms of decolonial futures? In combination with decolonial studies, what do queer, feminist and postcolonial practices and theories bring to archival research? How could visual arts become a resource for decoloniality of archives? How could (de)coloniality question the meaning and method of comparativity and archival politics?

Symposium
Wed, April 20, 2016, 9:30 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Thur, April 21, 2016, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Studio Building of the Academy, Lehargasse 6–8, 1060
Vienna Turning (to) the Archive. Institutional Histories, Educational Regimes, Artistic Practices, and Politics of Remembrance (German/English)

The symposium examines questions on institutional memory, the National Socialist education policies, the relation of the politics of remembrance and artistic practice as well as the archive and its materials within critical historical research and art. Lectures, discussions, and workshops with contributions by Tal Adler/ Friedemann Derschmidt/Elisabeth Samsonow/Karin Schneider/Anna Szöke/Niko Wahl, Eva Blimlinger, Zsuzsi Flohr/Benjy Fox-Rosen/ Eduard Freudmann/Eva Reinold/ Luisa Ziaja, Minna L. Henriksson, Gila Kolb, Elke Krasny, Martin Krenn, Barbara Mahlknecht, Verena Pawlowsky, Birgit Peter, Sabine Plakolm-Forsthuber, Suely Rolnik, Dirk Rupnow, Anna Schürch, Bernadette Settele, Nora Sternfeld

Tue, May 3, 2016, 3:00 to 5:30 p.m., x hibit
Visiting Uncanny Materials. Founding Moments of Art Education.
Visit of the exhibition in the context of the course Kunst, Öffentlichkeit und Geschichtspolitik by Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski (German)

As part of the seminar on the didactics of art, the public and political history, the students will visit the Uncanny Materials: Founding Moments of Art Education exhibition and reflect on the work on and with the archive, including the associated politics of history and their inclusions and exclusions.

Tue, May 10, 2016, 5:00 p.m., meeting point: x hibit
1941: A Politics-of-History Walk through Vienna 
With students from the course Kunst und Öffentlichkeit taught by Elke Krasny (German)
The walk visits and discusses sites connected with the Nazi regime and the founding of the Master School for Art Education.

Wed, May 11, 2016, 11:00 a.m., x hibit
The Missing Monument – Commemoration in Progress
Workshop as part of Zsuzsi Flohr’s course Commemoration in Progress (English)
The seminar starts off exploring the different concepts of a “monument” and “memory;” it approaches the monument as a common knowledge and memory rather than only a physical object in space. The course deals with a specific historical event related to the very institution we are working at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna: In 1938, Jewish staff, students and professors were expelled from the Academy and additionally, in the same year Jews were expelled from Schillerplatz – on the initiative of the Academy. Schillerplatz had been of one the few public spaces that remained open to Jews until then. Although the traces of their histories have been made accessible there is no monument or manifestation to commemorate the expelled.

Fri, May 13, 2016, 4:00 p.m., x hibit
Curators’ tour (German/English)

Download Exhibition Booklet + Program, english

Download Ausstellungs Booklet + Veranstaltungsprogramm, deutsch

Venue | Gallery, Toni-Areal, ZHdK Zurich University of the Arts,
Level 4 + 5, Pfingstweidstrasse 96
Time | March 21–April 13, 2015
Opening | March 20, 2015, 7 p.m.

Organized by Eleonora Stassi, a collective dinner commemorates Lacy’s International Dinner Party on the occasion of the exhibition opening.

Opening hours | Tuesday–Thursday, 3–6 p.m.

«The International Dinner Party» was a simultaneous worldwide dinner happening created by Lacy and Pruess to publicize networks of feminist and women’s development organizations around the globe on the eve of Judy Chicago’s «The Dinner Party» exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.The project with its over 2000 participants from all parts of the world, demonstrated the extent of feminist organizing in a pre-Internet era.

Taken together, the International Dinner Party’s messages constitute an instant archive of feminist practice and thought. The «Suzanne Lacy’s International Dinner Party in feminist curatorial thought» exhibition joins Lacy’s 1979 art project with four contemporary collectives: ‹Aktion Arkiv›, ‹Queering Yerevan›, ‹radical practices of collective care› and ‹Red Min(e)d›. These collectives use different artistic and curatorial methods to combine activism, feminism, friendship, transnational collaboration, and critically involved spatial practices. In different ways, these collectives produce emergent feminist and queer feminist archives.

Curated by Elke Krasny

Invitation PDF download

Suzanne-Lacy_IDP_installation-view_1_ZHdK-Zurich_Arpil-2015__990

Installation view International Dinner Party by Suzanne Lacy and Linda Pruess (1979), Gallery, Toni-Areal, ZHdK Zurich University of the Arts, Zurich, 2015. 

On March 14, 1979, «a simultaneous world wide dinner happened on the eve of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Suzanne Lacy together with Linda Pruess mailed thousands of postcards inviting women from around the world to participate in the art project. Over 2000 women responded. They were invited to host dinners on the same evening that would honor a woman in their own region (…) Because of time differences, the work constituted a 24-hour performance At each dinner women collectively drafted a statement and sent it via telegram to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where the location of their dinner was marked by Lacy with a red inverted triangle on a twenty-foot wide black and white map of the world. The telegrams were displayed next to it. The project with its over 2000 participants from all parts of the world, demonstrated the extent of feminist organizing in a pre-Internet era.»

Taken together, the telegram messages constitute a world wide feminist archive of March 1979. The statements drafted by the women are an expression of international feminism. Their telegrams and letters reflect both specific local struggles and international networks of collaboration and exchange.

Aktions-Arkiv_02_ZHdK-Zurich-2015_Suzanne-Lacy's-IDP-in-feminist-curatorial-thought_sm_990

Installation view Aktion Arkiv, Gallery, Toni-Areal, ZHdK Zurich University of the Arts, Zurich, 2015.

«Aktion Arkiv (…) furthers participatory history writing. Unlike traditional archives, the association’s archive acts on site.» Helena Mattson, Meike Schalk and Sara Brolund de Carvalho initiated Aktion Arkiv, a not-for-profit association, in 2013. Starting from shared experiences of the restructuring of the Swedish model of the welfare state, the implementation of austerity measures, and the divide running through the contemporary immigrant Swedish society, they saw the need for a mobile archive.

Aktion Arkiv was invited by curator Maria Lind to contribute to the exhibition Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden on show at Tensta konsthall from October 2013 through May 2014. Tensta konsthall is located in a suburb of Stockholm that was built with the Swedish Million Program, an ambitious social housing program between 1965 and 1974. Today, many of the suburbs are identified negatively with the large late modernist housing ensembles and their mostly immigrant populations. Today, between 85-90% of the 19.000 residents of Tensta have immigrant background. For the exhibition Aktion Arkiv’s ambulant archive vehicle took off to Tensta. During the exhibition, the vehicle served for the exchange of information. It contained a library with books, photos, films, maps, a time line, a guest book, and archival material. It also housed a foldable table and seats, and functioned as a generator for discussion.»

Helena Mattson, Meike Schalk and Sara Brolund de Carvalho identified the year 1989 as a turning point, both globally and locally in Tensta. They connected the end of the cold war, the beginning neoliberalisation in Sweden, and the shift from labour migration to a global refugee migration with a 1989 international housing conference that had taken place in Tensta. Protagonists of the 1989 international housing renewal conference were invited to a witness seminar at the Tensta konsthall. It resulted in an intense dialogue and heated debates between the foreign guests and the public.

Queering-Yerevan_01_Installation-View_ZHdK-Zurich-2015_Suzanne-Lacy's-IDP-in-feminist-curatorial-thought_475

Installation view Queering Yerevan, Gallery, Toni-Areal, ZHdK Zurich University of the Arts, Zurich, 2015.

Queering Yerevan is self-described as «a collective of artists, writers, cultural critics and activists queering and using Yerevan as an experimental space.»

Starting from shared experiences of transitionality from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR, to the Republic of Armenia marked by post-Soviet globalization, exchanges with the Armenian diaspora, conditions of prevailing homophobia and patriarchy and the influence of the Armenian Orthodox church, the Queering Yerevan originally active under the name WOW, Women Oriented Women, began to work in 2007.

In addition to their own artistic and theoretical work, the three core members Arpi Adamyan, Shushan Avagyan, and lusine talalyan organize and provide infrastructures for artistic production and public exchanges. They put together events, exhibitions, happenings, film screenings, workshops, find funding, crowdfound, run a blog, and publish books. In 2008, they opened the garden of Zarbuyan 34 in Yerevan to host exhibitions and performances. The garden was a gathering space for exchanges with other artists, activists, curators, theorists, and with a wider audience. The garden was the site of producing, performing, exhibiting, exchanging, reading, translating, discussing, and playing.

In their first published book Queered: What’s To Be Done With Xcentric Art they combineexperimental, poetic, and theory-based writing with the e-mail correspondence that both instituted and constituted the formation of the loose local and diasporic network of queer and feminist Armenian artists and intellectual producers active around the QY collective. Filled with debates, conflicts and emotions, it also makes public the work of funding and the complex processes around funding applications. Different formats of writing meet and mix. So do the languages and alphabets of Armenian and English. «A two-year conversation» amongst different Qeering Yerevan members that took place on a listserver via e-mails was also included. Therefore, the book functions as an open-ended archive.

For the exhibition «Suzanne Lacy’s International Dinner Party in contemporary feminist thought» Queering Yerevan contributes a new film based on the experiences of the three years of the garden of Zarbuyan 34. Making use of documentary videos shot during exhibitions, performances, discussions, lectures, and presentations, the film, like their book, can be understood as a site of experimentation and exchange. The film, like the book, constitutes a complex, open-ended, queer feminist archive.

Installation-View_01_ZHdK-Zurich-2015_Suzanne-Lacy's-IDP-in-feminist-curatorial-thought_990

Installation view radical practices of collective care, Gallery, Toni-Areal, ZHdK Zurich University of the Arts, Zurich, 2015.

radical practices of collective care is self-described as a «collective research process investigating collective practices of care, reproduction and mutual aid as related to social movements.» It was initiated by Manuela Zechner, Julia Wieger and Bue Rübner Hansen in 2012. Starting from shared obsvervations «that the impact of the 2008 financial crisis could be felt strongly especially in Spain, Greece, Portugal and that austerity politics started to take effect, further dismantling the social institutions once provided by the (welfare)state throughout Europe» the three began their practice of a useful archive on «autonomous self-reproduction». Their collaborative work is based upon shared interests in «care, social reproduction/reproductive labor and, related to these questions, forms of organizing, food production and housing.» The first year their work was hosted and supported by the VBKÖ, the Austrian Association of Women Artists. The VBKÖ Vereinigung Bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs was founded in 1910. Today, the VBKÖ exists as a space for fostering contemporary feminist artistic agendas, offering a space for experiments and promoting political and activist work, in order to establish a new and vital connection between historical debates and contemporary queer, feminist art production.

In 2014, following an invitation by Katharina Morawek and co-curator Manuela Zechner they conducted a workshop with Territorio Doméstico at the Shedhalle Zürich in the framework of the exhibition How we want to live. Madrid-based domestic worker’s group Territorio Doméstico, is a collective of mostly migrant women working in private homes. Territorio Doméstico has been a powerful voice in defending the rights of domestic workers and a key reference for creative and community-based methodologies of organising.

Their blog: http://radicalcollectivecare.blogspot.co.at is a growing and open-ended archive. Here, they share knowledge on «autonomous, collective practices that enable us to create alternative structure of care; alternatives to those options offered by the state and its capitalist logics that determine our daily lives; practices that allow us to imagine a different everyday, and offer us tools to escape the effects of austerity politics.» For the exhibition «Suzanne Lacy’s International Dinner Party in contemporary feminist thought» radical practices of collective care contributes a new text-based work offering a reflection of their practice. Responding to questions posed via e-mail by Elke Krasny, radical practices of collective care collectively authored About the Radical Collective Care Practices Project – an interview text. It is presented in the form of two posters using black type on a red ground.

Red-Min(e)d_02_Installation-View_ZHdK-Zurich-2015_Suzanne-Lacy's-IDP-in-feminist-curatorial-thought_990

Installation view Red Min(e)d, Gallery, Toni-Areal, ZHdK Zurich University of the Arts, Zurich, 2015.

Red Min(e)d is self-identified as a «feminist curatorial group» active with(in) and beyond the post-Yugoslav space. The four members are Jelena Petrović and Katja Kobolt, Danijela Dugandžić Živanović, and Dunja Kukovec. Starting from shared experiences of transitionality from the Socialist Federalist Republic of Yugoslavia to post-socialist globalization and based upon shared beliefs in curating feminist knowledge, friendship, and solidarity, the group started Red Min(e)d and their ongoing Living Archive project in 2011. The Living Archive produces and shares knowledge on the intersections of feminism and contemporary art in the post-Yugoslav context.

«We have been working on the basis of solidarity and consensus. We are four and we are constantly shifting power between us (…) we have been building a truly safe space of belonging. Living Archive editions took place in Zagreb, Vienna, Stockholm, Sarajevo, and Ljubljana.» The Living Archive is an exhibition laboratory and a public interactive archive with several (non)working stations such as: a Audio/Video booth that documents and presents live artists talks, discussions, and interviews, the Perpetuum Mobile with a growing collection of video and other media art, and the Reading Room where one can fill out the feminism and art Questionnaire, and since the Sarajevo edition there is also the Curatorial Forum.

«What we have known since the first edition of the Living Archive is that most artists, curators, and authors, just like each one of us, have no salaries, no health insurance, have no savings, have no studios, no security and no plans for future. They produce hungry, tired, love sick, home sick, lonely, with friends, using the equipment and skills of their friends and giving their lives, time and energy to produce art knowing that most of the people around them believe that art is just a commodity.»

In 2013, Red Min(e)d were nominated as October Salon curators. Initiated in 1960 by the City of Belgrade, the Salon is the oldest and most prestigious institution of contemporary visual art in Belgrade. «We searched for a public museum or a gallery in Belgrade that would be big enough to host over 40 artistic positions, have at its disposal an operating license to be able to welcome the public, be open and available in autumn and have heating and electricity in the whole building.» They found neither a museum nor a gallery. They decided that the 54th October Salon would take place in the former KLUZ department store and factory, originally built as a military salon, currently owned by Zepter. The exhibition No One Belongs Here More than You appropriated the precarious space of a so-called private-public partnership afforded within the conditions of neoliberal predatory capitalism. During the October Salon exhibition they made manifest «the labor of art and the labor of curating.»

For the exhibition «Suzanne Lacy’s International Dinner Party in contemporary feminist thought» Red Min(e)d contributes a new work demonstrating their curatorial methodology. Their contribution comprises the following elements: Perpetuum Mobile Screening Act of Instinct by Elin Magnusson, video documentations of the two Living Archive Forums, No One Belongs Here More Than You and Creating The Feminist Archive Means Facing The Real To The Most Extent, and a wall paper based upon Saša Krekoš original visual identity developed for the 54th October Salon: No One Belongs Here More Than You integrating quotes from The Living Archive Questionnaire.

Elke-Krasny_On-Epistemology-and-Historiography-_-Critical-Curatorial-Feminist-Practice_2_ZHdK_Zurich_April-2015_475

Installation view Lecture Installation. On Epistemology and Historiography. Critical Curatorial Feminist Practice. (2014) by Elke Krasny, Gallery, Toni-Areal, ZHdK Zurich University of the Arts, Zurich, 2015.   

This lecture addresses epistemology and historio­graphy with regard to a feminist historiography of curating, a history of feminist curating, and a feminist critique of the hegemonic history of curating.

The first part of the lecture constellates a number of key publications on feminist art history, feminist art theory, women’s history, and feminist political theory. Looked at together, the grouping of these publications allows an understanding for the changes and shifts with regard to key issues of concern for feminist scholarship. The publications chosen reflect a special interest in the politics of material conditions and artistic production in relationship to the politics of feminist appropriation, transgression, and transformation.

The second part of the lecture brings together a number of key exhibitions dedicated to women’s art and feminist art over a period of 99 years, beginning in 1910. The constellation clearly demonstrates a feminist curatorial project within curating’s history.

The third part of the lecture examines a number of key publications relevant to the emerging project of curating’s historiography. The mapping of these recent publications clearly demonstrates that there is one strand of curating’s historiography and another strand of curating’s feminist historiography. These two strands run in parallel, yet they rarely intersect or overlap. One could argue that the publications do in fact share the same past, yet they produce a very different historiographical account of this past. The past finds diverse uses in both feminist critique and feminist alliances.

The fourth part of the lecture describes and theorizes Suzanne Lacy’s «International Dinner Party» as a key moment in feminist curatorial thought. The «International Dinner Party» project links issues of feminist organizing, and networking with issues of the archive and future change.

This lecture was held in the frame of the Research Platform for Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Cultural Studies, Practice-Based Doctoral Programme; A co-operation of the Department of Art at the University of Reading (UK) with the Postgraduate Programme in Curating at the Zurich University for the Arts, Institute Cultural Studies, Department Cultural Analysis (CH). Gasthaus zum Bären/ Museum, Zurich, March 7, 2014.

 

Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig
08.06.2013 – 08.09.2013, GfZK-2
Opening 07.06.2013, 7 pm

curated by Elke Krasny

an exhibition of the Architekturzentrum Wien

Hands-On-Urbanism_GFZK-Leipzig_2013__7248_

The research-based exhibition is dedicated to the history of the idea of appropriating land in urban space.
Since the shockwave of modernisation that accompanied industrialisation towns and cities worldwide have had to face some very significant challenges. City-dwellers have always found a number of solutions in crisis situations, they are involved in bottom-up urban development. Self-build and selforganisation, settlements and fruit and vegetable gardening lead to other forms of collective cohesion, neighbourliness and fair distribution. Another world can be planted, as today’s community gardeners are clearly showing.

Hands-On-Urbanism_GFZK-Leipzig_Elke-Kransy_DSC1082

Following many years of international research, the curator Elke Krasny presents 19 historical and contemporary case studies of bottom-up urban development in Chicago, Leipzig, Vienna, Bremen, New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Porto Alegre, Havana or Quito. They provide an overview of informal, self-organised collective movements and of the spaces that are created by them. The exhibition shows how decisively small projects have often led, and are still leading, to major changes.

Hands-On-Urbanism_GFZK-Leipzig_Elke-Kransy_DSC1073

‘Hands-on Urbanism’ introduces an alternative urban history, one that poses urgent questions about the responsibility of design for architects and planners, and the resource-logic of towns and cities. What do architects do in this process, and what can be learned from the bottom-up in this urban history? Its role ranges from initiative via activism to conducting research. How are urban planning authorities reacting to these developments? The spectrum ranges from the founding of a settlement regulatory agency, via infrastructural measures and tolerance, to measures of support from the authorities, but also the introduction of new laws and legal sanctioning in official urban plans. 

Hands-On-Urbanism_GFZK-Leipzig_Elke-Kransy_DSC1072

Hands-on Urbanism 1850 – 2012. The Right to Green was initiated and curated by Elke Krasny forArchitekturzentrum Wien.

Exhibition graphic: Alexander Schuh
Scenography: Alexandra Maringer

hands-on-urbanism_elke-krasny_leipzig_2013_

 

Hands-On-Urbanism_GFZK-Leipzig_Elke-Kransy_DSC1070

 

Hands-On-Urbanism_GFZK-Leipzig_Elke-Kransy_DSC1068

Hands-On-Urbanism_GFZK-Leipzig_Elke-Kransy_DSC1066

Hands-On-Urbanism_GFZK-Leipzig_Elke-Kransy_DSC1064

Hands-On-Urbanism_GFZK-Leipzig_Elke-Kransy_DSC1062

Hands-On-Urbanism_GFZK-Leipzig_Elke-Kransy_DSC1061

Hands-On-Urbanism_GFZK-Leipzig_Elke-Kransy_DSC1060

Hands-On-Urbanism_GFZK-Leipzig_Elke-Kransy_DSC1058

 

Audain Gallery — Simon Fraser University

November 17, 2011–February 25, 2012
Opening: Wednesday, November 16, 7:00 pm

Audain Gallery SFU Woodward’s
Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
149 West Hastings Street
Vancouver BC

info@audaingallery.ca
www.audaingallery.ca

Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 12:00–6:00 pm

This process-oriented exhibition is a collaborative project between the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre (DEWC), visiting artist Elke Krasny, the art collective desmedia, playwright and performer Marie Clements, the collective Coupe, students from the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, and the Audain Gallery.

Photos: Kevin Schmidt

The DEWC is a self-initiated and self-organized space. Emerging out of what is now known as second wave feminism, women in the neighbourhood founded the centre in 1978. In many ways, it is an example of bottom-up feminist urbanism. In its day-to-day operation, the centre primarily represents Indigenous and older Chinese women, as well as other women of the Downtown Eastside community. What the women of the centre have claimed—and are still claiming—addresses and embodies all of the larger social, political, and economic transformations that have challenged the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. These claims in fact constitute a vivid and vital historical mapping of the neighbourhood. Cecily Nicholson, a coordinator of the centre, significantly enabled the involvement of the DEWC in this collaboration.

Elke Krasny is a project-based artist and curator concerned with counter-hegemonic and feminist strategies of intervening in historical narratives, and with creating new constellations in the exchange of different forms of knowledge. The collaboration between the DEWC, Krasny, and the Audain Gallery centers on a research-based mapping that draws from the archival materials from the DEWC. Presented as a text-based “horizon line” spanning the walls of the gallery, the exhibition offers a visual map of the demands and aspirations of the DEWC community. These demands, both current and historical, address issues of poverty, violence and insecurity, social exclusion, the deferral of rights, and the legacy of colonialism. Although describing specific challenges, these claims are also expressions of conviviality and solidarity. These expressions exist between women, between women and their neighbourhoods, and between the women of the centre and their global context.

Beginning their practice in the early 2000s, desmedia provided access to the tools and training necessary for members of the Downtown Eastside community of Vancouver to self-produce their own media representations. As part of this practice, desmedia collected a large archive of interviews on digital video and other kinds of artwork. On the occasion of this exhibition, Krasny and the Audain Gallery have invited members of desmedia to reassemble their archive and to publicly debate its future.

Playwright and performer Marie Clements has a history of collaboration with the DEWC. Based on a series of workshops with the women of the DEWC, she will produce a new performance work for the exhibition that explores the potential of fiction to express critical truth. Like Krasny, Clements explores writing as both a collective process and a process of collectivization formed by way of an expressive multitude of subjectivities.

By initiating this collaboration, Sabine Bitter, the curator of the Audain Gallery, is expanding and changing the institutional parameters of the position, function, and mode of operation of a contemporary art gallery. This important, necessary form of “self-challenging of the institution” (and perhaps also “institutional self-challenging”) reacts to a setting defined by rapid urbanization, gentrification, and the all-inclusive yet reductive scope of neo-liberal economics, a setting in which the Audain Gallery is ultimately situated.

During the exhibition, the gallery will function as a platform and meeting ground for the production and exchange of different forms of knowledge. The “horizon line” will be a framing device and backdrop for a series of events, performances, and projects that aim to build neighbourhood constellations that go beyond familiar exchanges. They also provide opportunities for direct community participation and the fostering of critical dialogue, while also challenging the conventional expectation of what constitutes a gallery exhibition. As part of the events, women from the DEWC will teach a series of hands-on workshops, including instruction on cedar weaving and the sewing of button-blankets, to share their knowledge of traditional artistic practices.

For a full schedule of the events, performances, and projects, please go to www.audaingallery.ca.

Working closely with the women of the DEWC, Elke Krasny, and our other collaborators, Mapping the Everyday examines the possibilities for and consequences of community-based political activity as articulated in relationship with contemporary artistic and institutional practices.

Mapping the Everyday: Neighbourhood Claims for the Future is realised in partnership with the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre with support from the City of Vancouver’s 125th Anniversary Grants Program; the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts, and Culture; the Vancity Office of Community Engagement as part of Simon Fraser University Woodward’s Cultural Unit; and the English Department of Simon Fraser University.

About the Audain Gallery

The Audain Gallery serves as a vital aspect of the Visual Arts program at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts. The gallery’s mission is to advance the aesthetic and discursive production and presentation of contemporary visual art through a responsive program of exhibitions and to support engaged pedagogy. The gallery encourages conceptual and experimental projects that explore the dialogue between the social and the cultural in contemporary artistic practices.

The Audain Gallery is curated by Sabine Bitter, working with gallery assistant Brady Cranfield.

Intersections of Art, Pedagogy and Protest

Galerie IG Bildende Kunst Vienna, Austria
15th Sept. – 29th Oct. 2010
Opening: Tue, Sept 14, 7pm
curated by Eva Egermann & Elke Krasny

2-or-3-things-we-ve-learned_elke-kransy-eva-egermann

Participating artists and theorists:
Ivana Bago, Madeleine Bernstorff, Sabine Bitter/Helmut Weber, Büro für fremde Angelegenheiten, Copenhagen Free University, Marijan Crtali’c, Marthe Van Dessel, Petja Dimitrova, Dolce & Afghaner, Rainer Ganahl, H.arta Group, Heidrun Holzfeind, Annette Krauss, Kollektive Involviertheiten, Adriana Monti und Paola Melchiori, Schwere Schwestern und Vipfek, Sofía Olascoaga, rum46, Katharina Struber, Cecilia Wendt

Documents:
Art Work, Between Art & Education (Martina Greimel, Katharina Kanzian, Sophie Landerl, Marc-Michael Moser, Katharina Petru, Anna Maria Schähle, Rainer Spangl), Free Class Frankfurt, Rosa Kerosene, Manoa Free University, Meine Akademie, Reformpause (Marion von Osten in Zusammenarbeit mit Studierenden der Universität Lüneburg), School for Non-productive learning und andere

Spatial Interventionen/Exhibition: Nanna Neudeck/Titusz Tarnai
Spatial Interventionen/Collection: Julia Wieger

Eruption and displaced learning activity. The moment of protest also raises the issue of its effect in the future. How can another duration be created from out of the intensity of politicization, collectivity, debate and counter-reality? What role do relations that are being re-thought at the interface of artistic production, critical pedagogy and protest movements play?

Processes, shifts and interventions (through art in education) become subjects. The exhibition space will become a site where actors, processes, workshops & conversations, as well as photographs, videos, objects, and artefacts encounter one another, assemble. Art works confront the contradictions in the debates. On the one hand this will open up space for confrontation and on the other it will create an archive which documents the artistic projects and the processes of educational critique. Creating other forms and exploring the language of possibilities in the interstices of the hegemonic order. A few things will be learned.

Eruption und ver-rückte (verkehrte) Lerntätigkeit. Im Moment des Protests stellt sich die Frage nach dessen Wirkung in die Zukunft. Wie kann aus der Intensität von Politisierung, Kollektivität, Debatte und Gegen-Realität eine andere Dauer erzeugt werden? Welche Rolle spielen die Verhältnisse, die an den Schnittstellen von künstlerischer Produktion, kritischer Pädagogik und Protestbewegungen neu gedacht werden.

In der Ausstellung „2 or 3 Things we ́ve learned“ wird ein kollektiver Raum solcher Angelegenheiten und Begegnungen erzeugt. Prozesse, Verschiebungen und Interventionen (durch Kunst in Bildung) werden zum Thema gemacht. Der Ausstellungsraum wird zum Ort, an dem Objekte, Artefakte, Photographien, Videos, Prozesse, Workshops & Gespräche einander treffen, sich versammeln. Künstlerisches Arbeiten und Objekte treffen die Widersprüche der Debatten. So soll einerseits Raum zur Auseinandersetzung geöffnet werden, als auch ein Archiv angelegt werden, welches künstlerische Projekte und Prozesse der Bildungskritik versammelt und dokumentiert. Aus den Zwischenräumen der hegemonialen Ordnung anderer Formen bilden und die Sprache der Möglichkeiten erforschen. Einige Dinge wurden gelernt.

***

EVENTS:
* Sept 16, 6pm: Show and Tell Evening, hosted by Bollwerk
* Sept 23, 7pm: Raumnacht 1
* Sept 24, 7pm: Raumnacht 2
hosted by Nanna Neudeck/Titusz Tarnai (suedosttangente.org);
*Okt 14, 7pm: Screening with Madeleine Bernstorff,
En Rachâchant (F, 1982 Danièle Huillet/ Jean-Marie Straub)
* Okt,15 and 16, 2 to 6pm: A Take on Queer-Feminist Positions of Power,
Workshop hosted by Kollektive Involviertheiten

* Okt, 21 to 23: Space RE:solutions.
International conference, hosted by the Visual Culture Unit, TU Vienna
Info: www.kunst.tuwien.ac.at/conference.htm

* Okt, 28, from 9pm: TREAT ME RIGHT! Party. Performance
im Marea Alta, Gumpendorferstr. 28,
hosted by Kollektive Involviertheiten, Schwere Schwestern and Vipfek, Büro für fremde Angelegenheiten.

Info: http://www.igbildendekunst.at/kunst/ausstellungen-2010/2-or-3-things.htm

Öffnungszeiten Di bis Fr 13 bis 18 Uhr
Galerie IG Bildende Kunst
Gumpendorfer Straße 10–12, 1060 Wien
www.igbildendekunst.at

Du 11 février au 18 avril, 2010
Centre de design de l’UQAM, Canada, 1440, Montréal, rue Sanguinet

Le Centre de design présente la nouvelle exposition Penser tout haut | Faire l’architecture. Sous le commissariat d’Elke Krasny, l’exposition propose aux amateurs d’architecture de redécouvrir la discipline sous un autre angle : celui de l’univers intime des bureaux d’architectes.

PENSER-TOUT-HAUT_FAIR-L'ARCHITECTURE_elke-krasny_L'UQUAM

Exposition

Où commence l’architecture ? Comment les idées naissent-elles et comment leur donne-t-on une forme matérielle ? Quels sont les liens entre la conception architecturale et ses modes de production ? À quelles sources d’inspiration puisent les architectes ? Quels sont leurs outils ? L’environnement de l’atelier et les outils utilisés influent-ils sur le processus décisionnel ? Penser tout haut | Faire l’architecture propose quelques points de vue et offre des réponses concrètes à ces questions complexes. Au moyen d’entrevues, de documents photographiques et d’exemples bien réels – maquettes, dessins, divers autres objets – elle nous fait voir plus intimement vingt-deux pratiques architecturales.

À partir d’une idée de la commissaire Elke Krasny, cette exposition constitue la transformation et la contextualisation canadienne de l’exposition Architektur beginnt im Kopf (The Force is in the Mind) | The Making of Architecture. Originalement présentée d’octobre 2008 à février 2009 à l’Architekturzentrum Wien (Vienne), l’exposition présentait à sa manière vingt bureaux d’architectes très en vue.

Onze bureaux architecturaux canadiens ont été interviewés dans le cadre de l’exposition Penser tout haut | Faire l’architecture auxquels s’ajoutent onze bureaux internationaux présentés dans l’exposition précédente à Vienne. La méthode unique utilisée par Elke Krasny pour mener ses recherches en atelier, ainsi que sa manière particulière de choisir ses « sujets » et de saisir photographiquement chaque espace représentent une approche différente de la présentation de l’architecture. Plutôt que de nous montrer des projets finis, nous sommes informés des processus de design utilisés, des préoccupations et des intérêts généraux de chaque bureau et de leurs solutions de design. Par des textes et des citations tirées des conversations avec les architectes, par les instantanés photographiques pris en atelier et par une sélection d’objets provenant de chaque bureau, nous en arrivons à un aperçu véritable des univers créatifs de chacun des architectes, participant ainsi à leurs quêtes intellectuelles.

Un lexique des outils pour penser tout haut préparé par Céline Poisson, professeure à l’École de design, accompagne l’exposition, rassemblant une soixantaines d’objets matériels et autant d’objets conceptuels servant d’outils de calcul, de dessin, d’organisation, de notation, de réflexion et d’imagination nécessaires au travail quotidien des architectes et designers. La collection comprends ainsi des objets de natures et d’époques diverses, allant du compas au Iphone, du bloc Lego à la définition du mot “forme”, de l’ordinateur portable au guide touristique.

Comme le dit Krasny : «La production collective de connaissances en architecture, telle qu’elles sont emmagasinées dans les outils […], révèle que faire l’architecture est une pratique remplie de contradictions entre les standards et les nouvelles orientations qu’on leur donne, entre les normes internalisées et les transgressions délibérées ».

Penser tout haut | Faire l’architecture présente au public montréalais une exposition dans laquelle sont abordés des enjeux liés à un large éventail de recherche et de réflexion sur la nature même du processus de création, les méthodologies et les composantes qui font qu’une bonne idée se traduit en œuvre exceptionnelle en architecture, en art ou en design.

Activités
• Vernissage
10 février 2010, 18 h
Centre de design de l’UQAM

• Conférence de Jean-Pierre Cometti
Les outils pensent-ils ? L’esprit-architecte et les rêves d’Eupalinos
11 février, 18 h
DE-3240 (3e étage)
Pavillon de design de l’UQAM
1440, rue Sanguinet

• Visites commentées offertes aux groupes
Du niveau universitaire au niveau primaire, ces visites sont offertes sur demande et adaptées aux besoins spécifiques de chaque groupe.

Réservations requises auprès de Michèle Hébert au 514 987-3000, poste 3421 ou au hebert.michele@uqam.ca

http://www.centrededesign.com/centre.html

Photographie © Copyright M. Brunelle