MA–EX Events

Lately, SPORTS has been preoccupied with the elasticity of the built environment.  How can the world of objects and spaces alternate between the functional and ordinary on one hand and the playful and poetic on the other?  In this talk, SPORTS will discuss their work's ambition to flexibly flicker between these states and in doing so, embrace ideas of ambiguity, novelty, and discovery.

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The feminist movement has impacted every facet of society, including the way we view art and architecture. Unfortunately, feminism’s impact on architecture has been largely overlooked. This lecture will explore one of these under-recognized efforts—an exhibition by the Chicago-based feminist curatorial collective CARYATIDS—as well as recent exhibitions by ArchiteXX and Point Line Projects that aim to put feminist exhibition principles into practice.

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Critic and curator Mimi Zeiger will discuss how hard issues raised in her critical writings are tested in curatorial settings and how softness might be a place of resistance. She’ll offer insight into the curatorial practices and research which led to Dimensions of Citizenship, the U.S. Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, the 2019 exhibition Soft Schindler at the MAK Center in Los Angeles, and the ongoing 2020-21 Exhibit Columbus New Middles symposium and exhibition.

Interrogating the spatial conditions of design and citizenship, and rethinking conventional binaries embedded in architectural histories, these exhibitions present works by architects, designers, artists, and thinkers who put forth visions of belonging and new ways of making through conceptual and material practice.

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“Sculpture exists in and defines not just physical space, but psychic space, conceptual space, political space. And not just space, but our presence in it, our relationship to it, our movement through it, our responsibility for it.” This quote from the introductory text for the group sculpture show, This is what sculpture looks like, at New York City’s Postmasters Gallery in 2014 underscores all that is compelling about sculpture - but omits what is currently being debated regarding public sculpture - its responsibility to its audience. Responsibility to the audience is complicated when the sculpture functions as public art, or even more complex, as a monument - and the audience/impacted population is not just human passersby, but flora and fauna, the ancestors of a site, or its future inhabitants.

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The history of exhibiting art has a long-standing relationship with domestic space from upscale salons to the apartment gallery, where one was accustomed to discerning between art and everyday objects, moldings and reliefs, and in rooms of various sizes, lighting conditions and decorative styles. This relationship commingled the informal with the formal, the personal with the public, the intimate with the spectacular — creating an interwoven relationship between audience and home, art and the private interior.

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