Join us for a panel discussion to launch the recently published Graham funded book Possible Mediums. The editors Kelly Bair, Kristy Balliet, Adam Fure, and Kyle Miller will present the Possible Mediums book and will be joined in discussion by Zoë Ryan.

Possible Mediums presents a collection of sixteen speculative design mediums by emerging architects. Each chapter defines an active medium in contemporary architecture through descriptions, drawings, and objects. Possible Mediums arranges projects according to shared technical and aesthetic traits, creating a vibrant taxonomy of design. Descriptive texts explain the working principles behind each medium and introduce design concepts intended to inspire students and professionals alike. Through its many contributors, Possible Mediums establishes design as a collective endeavor propelled by the open exchange of ideas and techniques. Possible Mediums is not a systematic theory, a manifesto, or a banal survey; it is a projection of architecture and knowledge to come.

Kelly Bair is Partner of BairBalliet, Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture.

Kristy Balliet is Partner of BairBalliet and Faculty at Southern California Institute of Architecture.

Adam Fure is Principal of T+E+A+M and Assistant Professor at University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

Kyle Miller is an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University School of Architecture.

Zoë Ryan is the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. A curator and author, her projects focus on exploring the impact of architecture and design on society.

Related Graham supported projects:
2018 grant to Kelly Bair, Kristy Balliet, Adam Fure, and Kyle Miller for the publication Possible Mediums

Image: Cover of Possible Mediums, 2018.

Charles Bernstein is the recipient of 2019 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, the premier prize for lifetime achievement in poetry, administered by Yale University. He will read poems from Near/Miss (University of Chicago Press, 2018), honored by the prize, and more recent work. Presented in relationship to the exhibition Eternal Gradient, Bernstein will also read works in response to Arakawa and Madeline Gins’ work, reflecting his decades-long friendship with the artists.

This event is presented in partnership with the Poetry Foundation.

Charles Bernstein is the author of Near/Miss (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Pitch of Poetry (Chicago, 2016),  Recalculating (Chicago, 2013) and Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (Chicago, 2011).  In 2010, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems. Bernstein is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is codirector of PennSound. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience.

Image: Arakawa’s cover for Bernstein’s book Islets/Irritations, (New York: Jordan Davies, 1983)

For more information on the exhibition, Eternal Gradient , click here.

The starting point for Vlatka Horvat’s performance Third Hand is a collection of scenes, images, and moments that other artists and writers have recounted to her from memory. Responding to this unruly catalogue of vivid fragments, all of which focus on the performing body, Horvat creates a work that is somewhere between collage, animated archive, partial reenactment, and memory palace. Third Hand explores the ways in which performance lingers despite the processes of distortion, displacement, and erasure which take place in memory and over time, and which are amplified through the act of narration.

The human body summoned in Third Hand is a problematic, transforming, and misremembered one—mistaken for animal, ghost, object, or machine; hesitant and determined; exhausted and persisting; ecstatic, working, resting, and playing, as it is made and remade in language and in the moment of performance.

Work in progress developed and performed with Michael Thomas.

Vlatka Horvat works across a wide range of forms, including sculp­ture, installation, drawing, performance, photography, and writing. Her work is presented internationally in a variety of contexts—in museums and galleries, theater and dance festivals, and in public space. Recent exhibitions include: Croatian national Pavilion at the 16^th Architecture Biennale, Museums Sheffield, Renata Fabbri Gallery (Milan), Eastwards Prospectus (Bucharest), Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Bard Center for Curatorial Studies (upstate NY), Wilfried Lentz Gallery (Rotterdam), CAPRI (Düssel­dorf). Her performances have been commissioned and presented by venues across Europe, North America, and beyond, including HAU – Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), LIFT – London International Festival of Theatre, PACT Zollverein (Essen), Tanzquartier Wien (Vienna), Outpost for Contemporary Art (LA), and many others. Born in what used to be Yugoslavia, Horvat moved to the US as a teenager. After 20 years in the States, she currently lives in London, where she teaches in the Fine Art department at Central St Martins, University of the Arts London.

IN>TIME is Chicago’s triannual winter-long performance festival. The IN>TIME Festival features a season of performances, presentations, and exhibitions at venues throughout the city from local, national, and international artists.

Image: courtesy of the artist

Most people in the design world know Philip Johnson, or think they do: He was the controversial architect with the round glasses who built a glass house and gave us the chippendale-capped AT&T Building in New York. But who, really, was he? In the course of his long life, he had a series of careers—curator, critic, journalist, politician—of which architect was only one. He was intellectually peripatetic. His buildings ranged widely in style and quality. How did he become this way? Who exactly was this complex man? Johnson biographer and Graham grantee Mark Lamster will talk about the process of figuring out Johnson, and putting that story into narrative form for his new book, The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century.

Mark Lamster is the architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News and a professor at the architecture school of the University of Texas at Arlington. In 2017, he was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal, and he is a regular contributor to numerous magazines.

Related Graham Foundation supported projects:
2010 research grant to Mark Lamster for Philip Johnson: A Biography

Image: The Glass House, in New Canaan, CT

Pita is Peter Rehberg. In this performance—his first US solo date in more than a decade—he offers a semi-improvised electronic music concert with a new modular set-up.

Peter Rehberg (b.1968, London) cofounded the influential Mego label in 1994 and soon after began recording under the name Pita. His first solo release, Seven Tons for Free, came out in 1996, melding noise with techno. Since then he has produced over a dozen albums, covering an astonishing variety of experimental electronic styles. The Get Out / Get Down / Get Off trilogy received broad international critical acclaim and helped define the radical underground experimental electronic scene of the 1990s. He has played numerous concerts all over the world, including SONAR, ATP, CTM Berlin, MUTEK, Donaufestival, Le Guess Who?, and Atonal. In 1999 he won the Prix Ars Electronica for Digital Musics & Sound Art. In addition to his solo work, he is best known for long term collaborations with Stephen O’Malley, as KTL, and with Jim O’Rourke and Christian Fennesz as Fenn O’Berg. He also runs the groundbreaking label, Editions Mego, which has released albums by artists such as Hecker, Mark Fell, Fennesz, and Kevin Drumm.

In May 2009 Rehberg performed at Lampo with Marcus Schmickler. He also appeared at Lampo in March 2003, when he premiered Get Off.

Since 2010 the Graham Foundation has supported and partnered with Lampo to produce this performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a non-profit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

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