Gliding through the streets on my bike, Christof Zwiener's artist-run project space Tacho KREUZBERG came as a surprise, even with Google maps as my guide. Nestled within a playground Am Wassertorplatz, this tranquil location hosts an exhibition by Birte Endrejat entitled 'It's all Yours.'.
What are the links between performance and the everyday human flows ? Gomenes is a project set up by Netting the Work's Eva Giannakopoulou and Rilène Markopoulou that took place last April 2016 in the framework of the Athen Biennale. Let's discover another attempt to examine gender stereotypes.
On a recent visit to Copenhagen, Making Spaces caught up with blogger Sandra Hoj to hear about her pragmatic, ever critical approach to issues of urbanism in a city that is widely regarded as being the most liveable in the world.
THANKS TO the prize she will study the typology of collective housing, with investigations from historical precedents in the former Soviet Union to solar kitchens of India and kitchenless dwellings in Korea and Japan.
Niche Berlin co-founder and Making Spaces initiator Nele Heinevetter looks to the programme of the upcoming Venice Architecture Biennale to find inspiring architectural practice by women. Talking of inspirational women: we’d like to introduce Luba Michailova und Victoria Ivanova. Successful businesswomen and founder of Izolyatsia Foundation, human rights-lawyer and brilliant art theorist, they bring new perspectives to Eastern Ukraine and this year's Venice Biennale. London-hailing, Berlin-based writer and editor Fiona Shipwright presents the work of Laurel Ptak, shedding light on the contemporary realities of digital space - and in turn, illuminating the ideological and functional frameworks that structure initiatives like Making Spaces. "Maybe we need to start recognising that the information architecture and code used in constructing a website are equally like architecture in physical space — on some level it embodies ideologies and controls our behaviour.”
Art historian and L'Espace Féminin co-initiator Christina Landbrecht shares her thoughts on a remarkable - yet obscure - woman architect. Maria Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo is a perfect example of how long it may take for an interesting female architect to get some media attention. So far there are two books about her work and some articles in magazines such as Baumeister or Architectural Design. The reception of her work started around 2006 after she had already been working for 40 years in Sicily, where she was born in 1952. She lives, as she admits, a remote life, which makes it even hard for anyone to simply reach her by phone.
I, for one, have never thought seriously enough about Grafton Architects. I first became aware of their work when I visited the Sensing Spaces exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, back in 2014. This exhibition was an enthralling series of site-specific installations by various architectural firms, each exploring a different aspect of architectonic space. The monumental wooden structures by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton recreated the incremental differences of sun- and moonlight in space. The bold, brutish shapes made a stark impression, but the effects of the light were subtle and softly appealing. One senses this subtlety in their built projects time and time again. "First, the good news: The number of black women licensed to practice architecture in the United States has quadrupled over the past 15 years. The bad news? That number is still only 196." A thought provoking article in Architect Magazin highlights the disparity in numbers of the most marginalised sections of American society. The issues faced by women in architecture should be seen in intersection with the issues faced by people of colour and those who are generally less privileged. As a professional field required a great deal of education and networking, architecture is inherently exclusive. White women are thus significantly better represented in the field than women of other ethnicities - as the statistics show us quite clearly.
An architectural research practice based in Barcelona, working in publishing, criticism and curating. We take dpr-barcelona as an example of the breadth of architectural practice that goes beyond the preconceived conventions of the field. Ethel Baraona Pohl, "critic, writer and curator [but she prefers Professional Amateur]" - alongside César Reyes Nájera - is building discourse.
Beatriz Colomina is Professor of Architecture and Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University.
We first stumbled across her work as the editor of Sexuality and Space, which was rightly awarded the International Book Award by the American Institute of Architects. This compilation of essays provided such an exciting, unorthodox way to consider gender, sexuality, the socialisation of space, place and architecture. Expect more on Colomina in time... In early 1920s Europe, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution a variety of new artistic ideas linking art and architecture evolved, fostered by artists such as Kasimir Malevitch, Wassily Kandinsky and El Lissitzky. among them, a young woman named Katarzyna Kobro developed her artistic understanding and shaped her own idea of the „Unistic Sculpture“, which lead to her concept of sculptures shaping space. She composed her sculptures with the pre-existing forms of Suprematism, such as the circle and the cross, which she often connected by a metal band. These hanging structures formed closed waves appearing in a constant dynamic movement, thus referring to other concurent artistic approaches to overcome gravity. Kobro coated most of these Unistic series in a white monochrome paint, thereby disguising her use of wood and metal. She further dematerialized her work through her stringent composition — offering a clear concentration on the structure. Kobro's sculptures addressed the emerging scientific, philosophical and artistic concepts about multidimensional space and space-time. They were composed to define the seeming inconceivability of the infinity of space, which in her opinion did not define objects but was their essence and affecting their forms.
How to interpret the intersections of architecture, art, feminism and psychoanalysis?
Jane Rendell has been a repeat inspiration for all of us at L'Espace Féminin. Her work as a writer, art critic and architectural historian/theorist/designer, has exposed to us the interdisciplinary intersections between architecture, art, feminism and psychoanalysis. We continue to refer to her work on Critical Spatial Practice in our quest to define feminine space. Other authored works include: Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism, Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction and Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire. janerendell.co.uk 21. Februar – 31. Mai 2015, Marta Herford (Gehry-Galerien)
Marta Herford is a living example of how architects sometimes think of their buildings as sculptures. But what happens when this perspective is reversed, when artists engage with architecture? ...and an answer to the question: what will tomorrow look like?
An exhibition entitled 'How Soon is Now' at Galerie Judin invokes a group of 12 Berlin-based studios of architects, designers and engineers to revisit some themes of the legendary exhibition This Is Tomorrow held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1956.
A mobile and reproducible project on sexualities and space
Curated by: L'École du Magasin, XIe Session, Damien Airault, Valérie Chartrain, Stéphanie Garzanti, Estelle Nabeyrat, Benoit Villain. with: Bernard Bazile, Ursula Bieman, Monica Bonvicini, Carol Bove, Tom Burr, Jeff Burton, Alain Della Negra, Michel Dorais, Christelle Familiari, Johny Jensen, K8 Hardy, Nadine Norman, Marion von Osten, Planning Familial de Grenoble, Mickaël Tramoy and Marnie Weber. Les Formes Féminines
Galerie de la Friche la Belle de Mai April May 2009. With Eva Berendes, Monica Bonvicini, Kristina Braein, Delphine Coindet, Julie Dawid, Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez, Jenny Holzer, Séverine Hubard, Claire-Jeanne Jezequel, Colombe Marcasiano, Falke Pisano, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Jessica Stockholder, Jennifer Tee, Lina Viste-Gronli, Julie Voyce To parallel the history of sculpture with the history of women in the twentieth century brings one to an impasse where modernist 'objectivity' cannot reconcile itself with the performativity of real life. While sculpture boasts a 'high art' status, compounded in the modernist age by a self-reflexivity that eludes the trappings of genre. The term genre can be translated from French to mean either 'genre' in the sense of type, or gender. Historically, women artists have had trouble investing their work with a pure modernist theory, due to the perception of some intrinsic 'feminine character' in their work. Thus the fact of being a women catalyses the crisis of modern art - how does one tally the subjectivity of the artist with the alleged universality of aesthetics? Will this crisis lead to a renewed, heterogeneity of thinking? (Read more in French below) |