Michael Rakowitz, artist and professor, Northwestern University

Bryony Roberts, architect and visiting professor, Columbia GSAPP

Xaviera Simmons, artist

Moderated by Andrés Jaque, architect and adjunct professor, Columbia GSAPP

Performing History addresses performance as a medium for critically engaging cultural history. While permanent monuments can idealize and cement historical narratives, performances can render visceral the complexities of social histories. All of these speakers experiment with inserting history into everyday life, creating public experiences that slip between past and present.

Organized by Bryony Roberts and Columbia GSAPP.

Biographies

Michael Rakowitz is a Chicago-based artist who initiated paraSITE in 1998 as an ongoing project in which he custom builds inflatable shelters for homeless people that attach to the exterior outtake vents of a building’s HVAC system. His work has appeared at dOCUMENTA (13), P.S.1, MoMA, MassMOCA, the 10th Istanbul Biennial, Sharjah Biennial 8, National Design Triennial at the Cooper-Hewitt, and Transmediale 05. He has had solo exhibitions at Tate Modern in London, Lombard Freid Gallery, Alberto Peola Arte Contemporanea, and Kunstraum Innsbruck. Rakowitz was commissioned by Creative Time in 2011 for his project, Spoils, a culinary intervention at New York City’s Park Avenue restaurant that invited diners to eat off of plates looted from Saddam Hussein’s palaces. Rakowitz is Professor of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.

Bryony Roberts is designer, artist, and scholar. Her practice combines methods from architecture, art, and preservation to produce transformations of existing architecture. She has created projects for international architectural sites including the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome, Federal Plaza in Chicago, American Academy in Rome, and Neutra VDL House in Los Angeles. Her work has received a Graham Foundation Individual Grant and was featured in the Chicago Architecture Biennial of 2015, in addition to solo and group exhibitions in Rome, Boston, Berlin, Los Angeles, Houston, and New York. She has published her research in Future Anterior, Log, and Architectural Record, has co-edited the volume Log 31: New Ancients, and recently Tabula Plena: Forms of Urban Preservation. She earned her B.A. from Yale University and her M.Arch from Princeton University, and was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (2015-2016). After teaching at the Rice School of Architecture and SCI-Arc, she currently teaches at the Oslo School of Architecture and Columbia GSAPP.

Xaviera Simmons is an artist whose body of work spans photography, performance, video, sound, sculpture and installation. She defines her studio practice, which is rooted in an ongoing investigation of experience, memory, abstraction, present and future histories-specifically shifting notions surrounding landscape-as cyclical rather than linear. Simmons received her BFA from Bard College (2004) after spending two years on a walking pilgrimage retracing the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade with Buddhist Monks. In 2015, Simmons was awarded the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (Robert Rauschenberg) grant. Simmons has exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, The Studio Museum In Harlem, The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Public Art Fund, and The Sculpture Center.

Andrés Jaque is an architect and founder of the Office for Political Innovation, an international architectural practice that was awarded the Silver Lion for Best Research Project at the 14th Venice Biennale, the Dionisio Hernández Gil Award, London Design Museum’s Designs of the Year Selection, Mies van der Rohe Award (finalist) and Architectural Record’s Designers of the Year Selection. Their publications include PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society, Different Kinds of Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool, Dulces Arenas Cotidianas or Everyday Politics. Their work has been covered in A+U, Bauwelt, Domus, The Architectural Review, and The New York Times; and exhibited at the MoMA, London Design Museum, MAK in Vienna, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and RED CAT.

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