“Delirious Cities” Exhibition

Aperture Gallery

This event has ended.

This Thursday night, Aperture reveals Delirious Cities, the sixth annual Summer Open exhibition at Aperture Gallery, featuring twenty-three artists from fourteen countries working in photography, video, and other lens-based media. Inspired by Rem Koolhaas’s iconic 1978 manifesto Delirious New York, the exhibition considers how the city is an ever-changing landscape, a laboratory of identity, a place of contested freedom, and a supermarket of desires. Delirious Cities is the second Summer Open to be curated by a guest jury of leading photo editors. This year, the jury includes Brendan Embser, managing editor, Aperture magazine; Matthew Leifheit, artist and editor of MATTE Magazine; Chiara Bardelli Nonino, photo editor, Vogue Italia and L’Uomo Vogue; Azu Nwagbogu, director of African Artists’ Foundation and LagosPhoto; and Guadalupe Rosales, artist and founder of Veteranas & Rucas and Map Pointz.

Through their photographs, videos, and installations, the twenty-three artists selected for the 2019 Aperture Summer Open are defining the contours of metropolitan life in the twenty-first century, from the parks of Washington Heights to the bustling blocks of Luanda, Angola. They question the role of surveillance in Brussels, portray the opulent voguing scene in Amsterdam, saunter along the sidewalks of Istanbul, confront the specter of gun violence in Miami, and chronicle the dreams of Mumbai. Some apply bold colors to archival images, while others work beyond the city’s outskirts, in studios or mysterious environments. Together, they offer urgent statements about how images are shaping the contemporary city as an endless project, a delirious machine for living.

“Since its invention, photography has had a crucial role in defining and redefining the urban experience. It opened new perspectives, granted unprecedented access to overlooked or secretive communities, shaped the desires and aspirations of an ever-growing audience,” says co-curator and Vogue Italia editor Chiara Bardelli Nonino. “That’s what the artists of the 2019 Aperture Summer Open are doing: making the unexpected visible, forcing us to look beyond, to expanding identities and relationships in urban environments.”

“The Aperture Summer Open is the signal opportunity for emerging voices in photography—and for the photography community at large,” adds Brendan Embser of Aperture magazine. “Editors from New York and beyond are paying attention to who is selected. Through this exhibition, we hope to provide a platform for an exceptionally talented group of artists.”

Featured Artists
Sara Abbaspour / Laura Barron / Rydel Cerezo / Alex Huanfa Cheng / Rose Marie Cromwell / Esther Hovers / Mateo Gómez García / Délio Jasse / Lilly Lulay / Noritaka Minami / Alice Quaresma / Adam Pape / Carlo Rusca / Josh Schaedel / Michele Sibiloni / Chanell Stone / Leonard Suryajaya / Dustin Thierry / Bryan Thomas / Sally Tosti / Shelli Weiler / Yana Wernicke / Hal Wilsdon
About the Aperture Summer Open
The Aperture Summer Open is an annual open-submission exhibition at Aperture Foundation’s gallery in New York, featuring a wide variety of work by photographers and lens-based artists from around the world. Selected by a jury of leading editors, curators, and writers, the exhibition seeks to reveal and report on key themes and trends driving contemporary photography. The exhibition opens the doors to photographers of all ages, at all points in their careers, as a means of promoting new ideas and talent.

Special thanks to Aperture’s Summer Open partner, Adobe, for gifting a one-year subscription to the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan for 2019 featured artists.

Aperture Foundation’s public programs and exhibitions are supported, in part, by generous donations from our board of trustees, our members and other individuals, private foundations—including the Grace Jones Richardson Trust—and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the New York City Council. Thank you to the selected artists and to everyone who submitted to the 2019 Summer Open.