Chandigarh
Soo Kim
In 1951, India’s Prime Minister Sh. Jawahar Lal Nehru commissioned Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier to envision a Post-Independence, Post-Partition capital city of Punjab as a decolonization project for a new India. Chandigarh is known as one of the most important experiments in urban planning and modern architecture in the twentieth century in India. I am interested in how Le Corbusier’s plan for the city has changed in the decades since it was built, and the ways its residents have used and adapted the architecture in the accompanying population growth that anticipated 500,000 and currently accommodates more than 1.4 million residents. How does architecture shape our lives? How do we affect architecture?
With the Chandigarh works I have continued to investigate the utopian architectural visualizations of modernism, in this case, Le Corbusier’s modernist master plan and architecture for an entire planned city of Chandigarh. I am interested in how a utopian dream has changed and/or remained the same after the passing of decades, and with huge population growth. My work embraces the contrast of two cultures, two architectural traditions, and two philosophies, but also embraces their connections as they continue to shape the structure, aesthetics, and function of the city. Looking at Chandigarh today, I see the results of contested modernities between Le Corbusier and Nehru’s vision for a modernizing India and the presence and resilience of indigenous Indians to create and impact their city.
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Looting
Gal AmiramLooting is an exhibition that builds on extensive research into archaeological sites managed by Israeli settlers in Palestinian territories. Currently, there are approximately 6,000 archaeological sites in the West Bank. When Israel designates a location as an archaeological site, it grants the state the authority to confiscate land and displace the Palestinian population living in the area.
The exhibition focuses on three mosaics that were extracted from Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as an archaeological site in Palestinian East Jerusalem that now serves as an Israeli settlement. The mosaics are currently housed in an Israeli cultural settlement museum in the West Bank, where their relocation to official Israeli territories is considered illegal under international law. Through photo collages of the looted mosaics, the work reimagines them to display the Arabic names of their origins. With photography, video, and archival research, this project aims to reveal how Israel is using archaeology to rewrite history and obscure Palestinian landscape and heritage.
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Contemporary Art, Daily,
Brandon Bandy‘Contemporary Art, Daily,’ by Brandon Bandy which is a continuation of the modes of working developed by Bandy in the past 3 years, pointing towards the predominate modes of art production and distribution during the erosion of institutions and domination of online platforms. Bandy insists the photograph is the great equalizer within visual art and now defines artists’ scope of possibility, designating what art is made, its subject, its materiality, its mode of display, and its reception.
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Pridi in Paris
Prima Jalichandra-SakuntabhaiThe exhibition features a dual-channel video installation and soundscape, Maps of Paris. Conceived and built by my friend, Manop Buranapramest, the installation consists of a piece of glass that reflects the video playing from a monitor, overlaying with another video projection. These layerings of histories, both political and personal, reconstruct my own journey throughout the city of my youth and the invisible legacy of my great grand uncle, Pridi Banomyong. After studying at the Faculty of Law in the Sorbonne where he absorbed the ideals of French Republicanism, Pridi
returned to Thailand and organized the 1932 Siamese Revolution that changed the system of government in Thailand, from an absolute monarchy to a parliamentary democracy. Later forced into self-exile, he ended his days in Paris.
In lieu of plaques and bronze statues, I rubbed the surface of these buildings and streets to obtain a semblance of historical relics. Printed on clear vinyl banners, the rubbings form a contrast with the linearity of the map, confound space and time and reorient our bodies in the imaginary space composed of fragments of places. Accompanying collages act as a subtext, an annotation to the abstraction of these places.
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85 7 20
Hiroshi Clark85 7 20, a solo exhibition of images by LA-based artist Hiroshi Clark. The exhibition, in conjunction with the release of his new publication with the same title, is a curated selection of images from his family archive.
“My mother was part of a Japanese exchange student program in 1983 when she met my father in Orange County, California. He was 18 years old. After her return to Japan, my lovesick father sold his Nissan pickup truck and bought a ticket to Japan to court my mother. Once there, he rented a small room in a basement and got a job at a “cowboy bar” in Tokyo.”
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