VISUAL ARTS

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University is architect Le Corbusier’s only building in North America, and one of the last to be completed during his lifetime. In 2013, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts will celebrate its 50th anniversary.

For this occasion artists Katarina Burin and Amie Siegel conceived of the exhibition Brute. Engaging with the Carpenter Center building, Brute encompasses a set of new commissions by six international artists, a speculative exhibition model deploying objects and artworks from the Harvard University collections, as well as a series of events and performances. Burin and Siegel use the exhibition form itself as non-hierarchical process of discovery, inquiry, and collaboration.

For the first time in several decades, the sets of geometric lateral projection windows Le Corbusier designed for the Carpenter Center’s main lecture hall and Harvard Film Archive theater will be utilized for projection. A multi-projection event will put the projection windows into use, looking backward to the space’s initial 1960s design as one for various slide and film projections and ‘happenings’ (perhaps an extension of Le Corbusier’s 1958 multimedia Philips Pavilion), and forward to the complex use of the moving image across varied contemporary art and cinema spaces.