This exhibition explores the long life of late modernism in the field of architecture by bringing together a series of works created over the last decade by Shannon Bool, Kapwani Kiwanga, Rachel Rose, and Jonathan Schouela, a new film installation by David Hartt, as well as works by Lynne Cohen and François Dallegret produced in the 1960s and 1970s.
While the earlier artworks offer a contrasting yet representative view of some important tendencies at the time, the more recent productions make use of historical hindsight to renew the critical discourse on late modernism. To this end, they employ various methodologies such as archival research, site-specific interventions, a revival of traditional techniques or (neo)modernist strategies, speculative fiction, and autoethnography.
Skyscrapers by the Roots examines certain phenomena that emerged from the principles of functionalism and technological innovation underpinning the modernist project: climate-controlled interiors, large-scale modular standardization, strategies of accessibility, mobility, and transparency, integrated media flows, and the development of spaces devoted to self-design. Although initially connected to the pursuit of democratization and social progress, over time, these innovations became inseparable from an unsettling fusion of the spheres of private life, labour, consumption, and spectacle.
The works in the exhibition foreground the embodied experience of the built environment and ask the “ghosts” of modernism important questions about social organization: For whom were these spaces and their apparatuses designed? What modes of living did they presuppose? What processes of identification and production of desire? And what forms of coexistence? In response to these questions, the works construct a scenography, in which the ever meaningful and reinvented “remains” of modernism function as optical instruments whose projection, superimposition, and framing effects reveal surprising perspectives on the present.
