Art News:
“Remains Connected”
A conversation between architects Silva Ajemian and Aslihan
Demirtas,
moderated by experimental architect and theorist Lebbeus Woods.
Tuesday, May 11, 6:30 PM
Pratt Manhattan, room 213 adjacent to the gallery
144 West 14th St.
New York, NY 10011
212 647-7778
www.pratt.edu/exhibitions
Free and open to the public
This event is the second in a series of public discussions
organized in conjunction with the "Blind Dates" curatorial project which opens at
Pratt Manhattan Gallery in November 2010.
About the Participants:
Lebbeus Woods (b. 1940 in Lansing, Michigan) has
concentrated on theory and experimental work since 1976. He is the co-Founder
and Scientific Director of RIEA.ch, an institute devoted to the advancement of
experimental architectural thought and practice. His most recent books are Radical
Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), The Storm and The Fall
(Princeton Architectural Press, 2003), and System Wien (Hatje Cantz/MAK, 2005).
He is a recipient of the Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design and his works are
in public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the
Cooper–Hewitt National Design Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;
the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris; the Austrian Museum of
Applied Art, Vienna; the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Getty Research
Institute for the Arts and Humanities. Lebbeus Woods holds the position that
architecture and war are in a certain sense identical, and that architecture is
inherently political. An explicitly political goal of his highly conceptual
work is the instantiation of the conflict between past and future in shared
spaces. One of the most striking
examples of his work is his project on a possible future for the Korean De-militarized
Zone. Conflict and crisis are the forces within which the architectural forms
of Lebbeus Woods take shape. Lines and directions are traced out of a sheer
will to create a new space from the broken forms that are left, for instance in
the wake of the war in Bosnia. www.lebbeuswoods.net
Silva Ajemian grew up in Lebanon and moved to New York City
in 1996. She holds a Master of Architecture degree and a Bachelor of
Environmental Design Studies from Dalhousie University, Canada. She has been
practicing Architecture since 1996 and has worked with Michael Sorkin and Vito
Acconci. Recipient of the Rosetti Scholarship she documented the architecture
of public markets in London, and with a CIDA travel grant she worked on low
cost and sustainable housing projects for local communities in Tumaco,
Colombia, published by Tuns Press. With her partner, Jorge Prado, she founded todo
design in 2003, a multi disciplinary practice encompassing urban, architecture,
furniture and graphic design www.tododesign.com.
Their approach is simple: treat each project as a provocation. The resulting
expression in material, spatial and philosophical terms aims always for the
same result, to raise awareness of our surroundings, our interactions with it
and its impact on us. Silva has taught architectural design at Kamla Raheja
Vidyanidhi Institute in Mumbai, and at Dalhousie Univerisity in
Halifax.Currently she is an adjunct professor at the New Jersey Institute of
Technology, School of Architecture and a visiting critic at Pratt Institute,
NYIT and Cornell University.
Aslihan Demirtas holds a Master of Science in Architectural
Studies from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of
Architecture from the Middle East Technical University, Turkey. She is a
practicing architect since 1991 and has worked with I.M. Pei, as his lead
designer for international projects such as the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha,Qatar.
In 2007, she established her own practice in New York where she is working on
local and international projects and has collaborated with IM Pei on a chapel
project in Kyoto, Japan. As part of her research, Aslihan Demirtas has been
studying architecture as a wider interdisciplinary understanding of building
activity inclusive of landscape and infrastructure and ecology. Her research
has been generously supported by the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture.
She has published articles in journals and chapters in books by MIT Press,
Bauhaus and Harvard Press. Aslihan Demirtas is currently teaching design studio
at Parsons School of Constructed Environments where she runs collaborative
design projects with non-profit community groups. She has taught at Fordham
University and MIT and has lectured at GSD at Harvard University and Bauhaus
University in Weimar, Germany.
Abstract
At Ani, a bridge once connected the two banks of the
Akhurian/Arpacay River. Today, of the now collapsed bridge, only the abutments
on the two sides of the river remain, one in Turkey and the other in Armenia.
As the remains of the bridge exist in two territories, Ani exists in two
worlds, at once an important historic Armenian capital and an archeological
ruin in a military zone in Turkey at the border with Armenia. Two architects
are seduced by the collapsed bridge. Their project consists of a series of
visual, graphic and tectonic ‘conversations’ set up to investigate and
interpret the multiple existences of Ani, the river and its disconnected
bridge. They start by revealing the lenticular existence of the place and
develop by interweaving the resulting existences, references and projections. New
York based architects/designers Silva Ajemian and Aslihan Demirtas work to
reveal two stories, two forecasts.
As they bridge from their respective approaches, they seek to interleave
insights and articulate nested architectural and geographic narratives to
create illusions of simultaneity and unfold possible realities.
About Blind Dates:
As an interdisciplinary and cross cultural curatorial
undertaking Blind Dates tackles with the traces or ‘what remains’ of the
peoples, places and cultures that once constituted the diverse geography of the
Ottoman Empire (1299-1922). Taking the breakup of the latter’s complex history
as a point of departure, and considering the subsequent formation of nation
states throughout the region, the exhibition is an attempt to explore the
effects of various forms of ruptures, gaps, erasures as well as
(re)constructions, including continuities within discontinuities, through the
prism of contemporary lived-experiences. Blind Dates has been working with
artists, intellectuals and cultural producers interested in deconstructing
master narratives to give agency a chance, or to extend new ‘ways of seeing’
contentious historical accounts/events and their lingering effects on life
today. By pairing artists and non artists for a series of private/informal
discussions project co-curators, Defne Ayas and Neery Melkonian, have been
‘matchmaking’ to mediate encounters between distanced neighbors and their
estranged cultures. The exhibition will be based on collaborations stemming
from these critical encounters.
To learn more about Blind Dates please visit: