Collaborative book between photographer Chad Ress, photography historian Miriam Paeslack, and political theorist Bonnie Honig. Ress’s photographs of spaces produced from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act are presented along texts contextualizing them within the history of WPA photography, stock imagery, the politics of visibility, and the public’s engagement with public space. My essay asks how citizens and subjects of the state can engage in forms of governance and self representation when the state remains opaque. Published by Actar.
Spaces of Disappearance: The Architecture of Extraordinary Rendition
2018Filed under:
Research, BooksMonograph book investigating the sovereign claims of American power and architecture of secret prisons. Spaces of Disappearance reconstructs the network of black site prisons developed in the early years of the so-called War on Terror. The project includes an original archive of architectural representations, redacted documents, and media reports to build a knowingly incomplete spatial history of post-9/11 extraordinary rendition. The CIA interrogation program is presented as a coherent spatial project designed to deny prisoners their human subjectivity and purposefully obscured by government bureaucracy. Published by Urban Research (UR Books).
Edited with Avery Review, this book brings together writings and work at the intersection of architecture and climate change. Neither a collective lament nor an inventory of architectural responses, the essays consider the cultural values ascribed to climate, and ask particularly how climate figures, historically and at present, in our conception of what architecture is and does. Published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.
Who Builds Your Architecture? Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago
2016Filed under:
Research, Design, BooksExhibition linking the global cities of Chicago, New York, Istanbul, and Doha through a network of architecture firms, engineering and other consultants, and a vast population of unseen labor. Relationships between design, manufacturing, and construction operate within a global network of knowledge transfer, manufacturing, and labor—people and materials moving around the world, often in uneven and unequal ways. Installed at the Art Institute of Chicago (an earlier version was installed for the 2014 Istanbul Architecture Biennial and a later version installed in 2019 at Boston Architectural College). Collaborative work with WBYA? Graphics by MTWTF.
Research project, book, and exhibitions in Athens and Istanbul on the architectural and territorial dimensions of private art collecting and private art museum construction. Art collectors are building institutions and this project asks what the rise of private museums means in terms of civic access, state claims on culture, and the global, territorial forces of cultural-financial relations. Collaborative research project led by Mark Wasiuta and Craig Buckley. Installed at DESTE, Athens and Studio-X, Istanbul. Graphic design by MTWTF.
