OS 2.0.1 : Architectural Bodies

Architectural Bodies brings together the work of three artists who examine traces of emotional, psychological, and bodily experience within the built environment. The works on display point to the ways that individual and collective memories and interventions are mapped onto urban and domestic spaces. In various ways, the artists consider inhabiting as a transformative practice that can restake communal claims to designed spaces, their histories, and the political pressures within them. They posit embodied experience as an entry point to a deeper, more critical understanding of our surroundings:

Christian Hincapié’s sculptures, paintings and drawings integrate found and discarded materials, weaving together multifaceted narratives that highlight communities’ informal transformation of their shared environments. By pointing to everyday creative acts, Hincapié asks us to turn our attention to the histories of often-marginalized populations that are erased through large-scale urban planning and gentrification projects.

Sculptor Kathryn Lien builds objects that both resemble and augment the features of domestic architecture. Lien celebrates the language and the labor of craftsmanship as full of radical potential, often incorporating unfinished edges and infrastructural components of interior spaces. By appropriating the assumed femininity of these spaces, Lien imbues them with personal meaning and meticulous detail.

Working across video, performance, and sculpture, Felipe Steinberg’s work often examines the superimposed histories and geographies of an advancing technological and political world. In his film, Everything Related to Cold: 181, Cesar Bierrenbach Street, he relates the posthumous liquidation of his grandfather’s shop to the loss of a local landmark. Steinberg lays bare the emotional subtext of seemingly mundane correspondence and the collective mourning in both the public and private realms.