This collaboratively built installation by ConstructLab that explores the concept of ’Togetherness’ will be the location of public programmes and workshops thoughout the Biennial. It’s an agora for public conversationns, a public wall for expression, and it comes with an ’anti-manual’ that lists the possibilities for transforming space. Photography: Kendall McCaugherty, 2019. Courtesy of Chicago Architecture Biennial.
Meet CAB 2019 participant Akinbode Akinbiyi. British born, Berlin based Akinbiyi has honed his art of documenting mega cities through photography. His work has taken him across the African continent – Lagos, Cairo, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, and Addis Ababa. For CAB 2019, he presents ‘Easy Like Sunday Morning— North Lawndale’ a series that resulted from the artist’s month-long residency in Homan Square in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighbourhood. His work searches for spiritual meaning in the ‘seemingly endless urban topography.’ Pictured here: ‘African Mobilities: this is not a refugee camp’, Architectur Museum TUM, Munich, 2018. Photography: Lindsey Appolis
At the Chicago Cultural Center, Theaster Gates’ contribution reinterprets Hans Haacke’s work ‘Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971’ which used documentation to demostrate the power dynamics of one of New York’s most controversial real estate owners. Here, Gates refocuses the framework upon his own real estate acquisition history, drawing on his training in urban planning and preservation. The force behind the Rebuild Foundation and Stony Island Arts Bank, Gates is behind the restoration and reactivation of abandoned buildings and vacant land in Chicago, where he seeks to demonstrate the potential political power in seemingly under-resourced communities. Photography: Kendall McCaugherty, 2019. Courtesy of Chicago Architecture Biennial.
Comprising London-based architects, urbanists and AA school unit masters John Palmesino & Ann-Sofi Rönnskog, Territorial Agency, combines architecture, analysis, advocacy, and action. Initially developed in collaboration with Greenpeace, Territorial Agency’s project Museum of Oil examines how the oil industry has infiltrated and disrupted global finance, communities, and the natural environment. Pictured here: installation view of Museum of Oil at ZKM Karlsruhe, 2016. Photography: Harald Voelkl
Artist, theorist, and urban designer Adrian Blackwell has created the Anarchitectural Library at the Chicago Cultural Center which examines the Center’s history as the city’s first public library. Blackwell invites visitors to browse the collection of books exploring the founding of the library in the late 19th century as an institution to educate immigrants, workers, socialists, and anarchists – to its role today in Chicago as a public living room for all. Books in the library also highlight the work of contemporary organisations passion about keeping the spaces public. Pictured here and above: Anarchitectural Library (against the erasure of Chicago’s common spaces), 2019. Photography: Kendall McCaugherty. Courtesy of Chicago Architecture Biennial
Jimmy Robert takes over the Chicago Cultural Center north staircase with the work ‘Descendances du nu (Chicago)’ named after Marcel Duchamp’s iconic painting Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) and performed by a local artist. Combining performance, photography, film, video and drawing, Roberts explores the politics of spectatorship by reworking seminal avant-garde pieces in ways that complicate their racial and gendered readings. Pictured here: Metallica, Brandstof Performance, Garage Rotterdam, in collaboration with Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, as part of the exhibition ‘Prosecute my Posture’ curated by Sjoerd Kloosterhuis, 2018. Photography: Florian Braakman
Participant Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR) brings the project Refugee Heritage, to CAB 2019. Founded in Palestine in 2007, the research project-based artistic practice is engaged in the struggle for justice and equality, and the project presents documentation surrounding Dheisheh refugees. Also pictured here is Re-Rooting + Redux, a project by the Sweet Water Foundation. The timber structure is a new gallery space and installation designed in collaboration with Trillium Dell Timber Frame. The foundation is behind the regeneration of four contiguous city blocks in south Chicago. Photography: Kendall McCaugherty, 2019. Courtesy of Chicago Architecture Biennial.
The work of Cape Town based architects established in 2012 by Heinrich and Ilze Wolff, Wolff, is inspired by the colonial history of Cape Town. At CAB 2019, they present Summer Flowers, 2019, a research project looking at the life of South African writer, activist, and gardener Bessie Head (1937–1986). Collaborating with a wide range of people including photographers, artists, filmmakers, and writers, they see architecture as a method for addressing social inequities, as well as the erasure of indigenous landscapes and narratives. Pictured here: exhibition design of African Mobilities: this is not a refugee camp exhibition, Architectur Museum TUM, 2018. Photography: Lindsey Appolis
Berlin-based Clemens von Wedemeyer, who has a professorship in media art at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and previous shows at MoMA PS1, the Barbican Art Centre, Frankfurter Kunstverein and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago under his belt, presents his work Transformation Scenario, 2018. The piece juxtaposes real and fictional images with simulated crowd-control scenes produced by police training software. Pictured: Transformation Scenario, 2018, 20 mins. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Jocelyn Wolff, Paris, KOW Berlin
Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) brings a new interactive installation, Community Futures Lab, to the biennial. The work encourages Chicago residents and visitors to offer personal accounts of housing displacement and belonging through oral recordings, art making, and public debates. BQF is a Philadelphia-based interdisciplinary creative practice between Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips that weaves quantum physics, afrofuturism, and Afrodiasporic concepts together through community-based projects, performances and experimental artworks. Pictured: Black Quantum Futurist Womxn Portal (Rear View, Right View).
‘The Plot: Miracle and Mirage’ is a research project by Alejandra Celedón, Nicolas Stutzin, and Javier Correa that explores the history of free-market economics through a case study of a group of Chilean economists trained at the Chicago School of Economics during the 1970s and 80s who were responsible for conceiving the wholesale privatization of social services and financial infrastructure during their country’s violent right-wing military dictatorship. Celedón curated the Chilean pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018 where he presented a large-scale model of the National Stadium in Santiago, critically reconstructing the arena as a temporary residential project in response to the city’s housing crisis. Pictured: Nine Lookouts in Patagonia, 2018.
