“Museum Without Building” Exhibition

“Museum Without Building” Exhibition

EFA Project Space

This event has ended.

a project by Yona Friedman

Organized by Sylvie Boulanger, Nicholas Vargelis, Dylan Gauthier

Artists: Fanny Allié, Laetitia Badaut Haussmann, Théodora Barat, A Constructed World with Stephanie Lin, Pradeep Dalal, Yona Friedman, Richard Jochum, Dana Levy, Flora Moscovici, MDR (Maria D. Rapicavoli), Dannielle Tegeder with Christian Lynch, Nicholas Vargelis

A production of EFA Project Space in collaboration with cneai= (Paris-Pantin) and Le Petit Versailles.
Best known for his concepts of mobility and improvisation in architecture, Yona Friedman’s works inherently support practicability and flexibility, two attributes that seem increasingly important in response to the current ecological crisis. Friedman’s projects promote reuse and salvage, discarding the one-upmanship of contemporary architecture, and protecting the human need for housing from becoming a simple matter of economics.

“Starting in the late 1950’s, I had the idea of making a ‘mobile architecture.’ It was important that the inhabitant and user could be able to design their own living quarters by themselves. This [architectural] program involved a technique which allowed one to easily move all parts of the structure (walls, ceilings, floors) into any position, as simple as moving furniture.’’ ~ Yona Friedman, Biosphere, 2018

Museum Without Building is a collaborative and itinerant proposal for an exhibition based on Friedman’s work. Installed and activated at sites across New York City this summer, for 10 days it will be hosted as a project within the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space. Museum Without Building envisions the construction of an open format architectural structure that invites in artwork, performances, dinners, workshops and research in response to Friedman’s text, “Biosphere” which reflects on the need to build less, to improvise more with what we already have, and stands in opposition to the monolithic and egomaniacal architectural tendencies that we currently face in global urban centers.

For Museum Without Building, we have invited in 11 artists whose work displays a natural affinity with the themes and techniques inherent to Friedman’s oeuvre to make or share work in response to the Biosphere text along with an assemblage of work by Friedman himself. The invited artists reside and work in Paris (invited by the cneai=) or are in residence as members of the EFA Studios Program.

As part of the overarching public art event dedicated to Friedman’s work, earlier in the summer, during the course of a public workshop at AiA Center for Architecture, the public constructed several Museum Without Buildings following Friedman’s plans out of multicolored hula hoops. These modules function as “stages” for a living artistic ecosystem, and a ground onto which we might hang, etch, project, and develop new modes of living and being—if only for a time.

A new publication of Yona Friedman’s text Biosphere will be available for purchase at the exhibition opening and available thereafter through the EFA Project Space website.

Yona Friedman is an architect, artist, philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist who lives in Paris. He has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge University, Harvard University, the University of California, the University of Michigan, Princeton University.

Fanny Allié was born in Montpellier, South of France. She graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie (The National School of Photography) in Arles, France in 2005 and moved to New York City shortly after graduating. Princeton University, DOT Art, A.I.R Gallery, New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, Fresh Window gallery, Chashama and St Eustache Church in Paris, France have organized solo exhibitions of her work. NYU/Gallatin Gallery, Dorsky Gallery, Freight + Volume, Field Projects, BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Dekalb Gallery/Pratt Institute and The Bronx Museum among others have featured her work in group exhibitions. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, NY Magazine, Brooklyn Magazine, Hyperallergic, Le Monde Diplomatique, DNA Info, Marie Claire Italy and Artspace Magazine.

The references and materials employed by Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann attest to a profound inclination towards a modernist aesthetic without, however, becoming the subject. She carries out research involving several fields including history, sociology and psychology, driven by a reflection on forms of narrative, the relationship of analogies and macrostructures. Her work is often based on contemporary design, and frequently references cinema, literature, history, and architecture.

The work of Théodora Barat appears as a “terrain” where film, sculpture and installation mingle. Working in a permeable manner between these different media, she brings narrative to one, volume to another. Théodora is interested in degraded or changing environments, she captures their plastic peculiarities, restores them and puts them in a scene, thus trying to recreate their Aura.

A Constructed World have an expansive project that incorporates different modes of presentation and address. They have ongoing works such as Explaining contemporary art to live eels, The Social Contract and Hobbes Opera. At times they have formed groups, such as Speech and What Archive, working with artists, curators, writers, an art historian and a philosopher to make transmissions that incorporates speech, conversation, philosophical texts, music and singing. For Museum Without Building, they will be working with Brooklyn-based architect and designer Stephanie Lin.

Pradeep Dalal is Mumbai-born artist based in New York. His solo show was recently at Sala Diaz in San Antonio. His work has been exhibited at Callicoon Fine Arts, Higher Pictures, International Center of Photography, Murray Guy, New York Public Library, Orchard, ps122, and sepiaEYE in New York, the Miami-Dade County Library, Aljira in Newark, Tart Gallery in San Francisco and the Fine Arts Gallery at San Francisco State University, Franklin Street Works in Stamford, Blackpearl Gallery and the Sumner School Museum in Washington, DC, and internationally at Galerie Duboys in Paris, Galeria Arroyo de la Plata in Mexico, Chatterjee and Lal in Mumbai, Vadhera Gallery in New Delhi and Galleria de Arte in Havana, among others. His photographs were included in TAKE on Art, BOMB, Grey Room, Blind Spot, Cabinet, and Rethinking Marxism. His artist book “Bhopal, MP” was excerpted in the book “Chandigarh is in India,” and his essay “A Bifocal Frame of Reference” was published in “Western Artists and India.” He is the co-chair of the Photography MFA at Bard College and directs the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Arts Writers Grant Program. He holds an MFA from ICP/Bard College and a MArch from MIT.

Richard Jochum is post-conceptual sculptor and media artist drawing from a variety of artistic practices reaching from land and public art to social sculptures, installation, photography, video, and artist’s books. To cross boundaries has become a hallmark of his practice over the years in my attempt to explore and bridge diversity in media, technology, and the arts. Jochum received his PhD from the University of Vienna (1997) and an MFA in sculpture and media art from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (2001). His art practice is accompanied by publications and research in the field of cultural theory, new media, and contemporary art and he has been awarded several grants and prizes. One of his latest large scale art installations has been a 30,000 square feet collaborative video mapping project onto the Manhattan Bridge.

Dana Levy was born in Tel Aviv Israel and lives and works in New York. She earned her MA in Electronic Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art Dundee, Scotland and her BA from University of the Arts London: Camberwell College of Arts. Her work has been screened at Tate London, Tribeca Film Festival, Oberhausen Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival Wexner Center of Art. Group shows include at The Israel Museum, The Tel Aviv Museum, Harn Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Neuberger Museum Of Art, The Bass Museum, Kadist Gallery, C24 gallery, Johannes Vogt Gallery, Invisible Exports Gallery, Screen City Biennial Stavanger, Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena and in the EVA International Biannual Ireland.

Flora Moscovici approaches painting using the extremely varied possibilities of the medium, including its contours. Her interventions change the perception of space and call up other temporalities: pictorial gesture, site memory and history of painting between the sacred and the vernacular.

MDR (Maria D. Rapicavoli) was born in Catania (Italy) and lives and works in New York. She was a fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2012 and she received her Master In Fine Arts from Goldsmiths University of London in 2005. In 2001 she received her B.A. from the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania. In 2015 she won the AIRspace residency program at the Abrons Arts Center in New York. She was a 2014 resident at the International Study and Curatorial Program in Brooklyn and a 2013 resident at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space Residency Program in NY. She has exhibited in several group shows including at Whitechapel Gallery, London; Yerba Buena Center For The Arts, San Francisco; Parsons New School, New York; Museo di Villa Croce, Genoa; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Museo di Villa Croce, Genova (Italy); Palazzo Reale, Milan; Guest Projects, London; Riso, Museum for Contemporary Art, Palermo, Italy; Strozzina, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; Sala Rekalde Bilbao; Italian Cultural Institute London and New York.

Dannielle Tegeder received MFA in Painting and Drawing from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. For the past ten years, Tegeder’s work has explored abstraction and architecture. While the core of her work is paintings and drawings, she also creates large-scale installation, and sculptural objects. Since receiving her MFA in 1997 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Tegeder’s work has been presented in over 100 gallery exhibitions, both nationally and internationally in Paris, Houston, Los Angeles, Berlin, Chicago, and New York. Tegeder has participated in numerous institution exhibitions including PS1/MOMA, The New Museum, The Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, and Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Several of her drawings have been purchased as part of the Contemporary Drawing Collection at the Museum of Modern Art. Tegeder is a recipient of several residencies and grants including The Yaddo Foundation, The Triangle Foundation Residency and Workshop, Elizabeth Foundation in New York, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Studio Residency at Governor’s Island, Smack Mellon Studios and Artist Stipend, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Lower East Side Print Fellowship Edition Award, National Studio Program, P.S.1/MOMA Affiliate, Clocktower, New York, NY, ART OMI, Omi International Arts Center, Omi, NY, Henry Street Settlement Studio Fellowship, NY, The Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Fellowship, NY, and Percent for Art, New York.

Nicholas Vargelis’ work combines various contemporary practices—social organisation, technological development, narrative histories, the iconography of forms (such as the history of the light bulb), with the artist as trickster or “situation inventor” who alters contexts to provoke different orders of thought. Nicholas’ practice is often collaborative and is, above all, influenced by a social network of artists, writers, architects and other thinkers.

ABOUT THE CURATORS

Sylvie Boulanger is an exhibition curator, publisher and searcher in the field of contemporary art. She is head of the National Art Image Publishing Center (cneai) since 1997. She develops programs of exhibition, research, residency, editorials and a collection of artists’ publications (FMRA collection)

Dylan Gauthier is Director of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, a 501c3 non-profit gallery devoted to experimental practices in the visual arts. For the past decade, Gauthier has straddled the line between artist, curator, and community organizer. Employing sound, performance, video, sculpture, and photography, Gauthier works through a research-based and collaborative practice centered on ecology, architecture, landscape, and social change.

In addition to working as an artist Nicholas Vargelis is also a curator and the program manager for Le Petit Versailles. His work focuses on social and environmental issues, taking into consideration the site specific nature of the garden itself.

Media

• Prints
• Installation

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