#grahamfoundation

This Thursday, October 20, 2016, at 7 PM (CDT) Dr. Joshua Simon will present "The Kids Want Communism" at Northwestern University's Department of Art Theory and Practice, in collaboration with the Graham Foundation, as part of their Visiting Artist Lecture Series.

The talk will outline how the communist horizon and real existing socialism can inform our understanding of the current social and cultural, political, and economic realities we are facing with the implosion of the neoliberal order. Simon's research in the past several years has been focused on notions of materiality and subjectivity, therefore, this talk will move between animism and productivism, commodity fetish and debt economy, double negation and metabolism, shock work and the dividual.

All Chicago friends are invited to join in this evening event! More details can be found here.

Image above: El Lissitzky, Poster for the Russian Exhibition (Russische Ausstellung), Kunstgewerbemuseum Zürich, March 24- April 28, 1929.

See the full lecture here:

Lina Bo Bardi: Together, Graham Foundation, through July 25, 2015.

The architect Lina Bo Bardi, born Achillina Bo in Rome in 1914, made Brazil home in 1946. She went there with her husband Pietro Maria Bardi initially to create the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. In 1969, she designed the concrete and glass museum, that lives on as a landmark of Brazilian modern architecture.

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This exhibition, curated by Noemì Blager, celebrates Bo Bardi as humanist and architect, and is responsible for my biggest case of house lust to date. In 1951, Bardi designed Casa de Vidro (Glass House) in a district in São Paulo called Morumbi. It’s a modernist masterpiece, an elevated pavilion of glass and concrete that floats atop hill lush with vegetation.

The installation design by the London-based design firm Assemble Studio is the other reason to come. Thick felt curtains reshape the rooms on the second floor into intimate curvy spaces with  exhibition cases made of metal and concrete—two of Bo Bardi’s favorite materials. Film installations by Tapio Snellman document the activity and the space of the SESC Pompéia, a gym and cultural center designed by Bo Bardi in 1982. 

It’s the ground floor that I return to, where there are photographs in light boxes by Iana Marinescu of the Glass House. Visitors are encouraged to sit in Bo Bardi’s bowl chairs originally designed in 1951. Arper, the Italian furniture design company reissued the chair a few years ago and is donating money raised from the sale of the limited edition of chairs to support the Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi. The organization and archive is housed in Casa de Vidrio, where Bo Bardi lived until her death in 1992. Until I can travel there, I will content myself with Zeuler Lima’s comprehensive book published last year by Yale University Press.