VISUAL ARTS

CARPENTER CENTER LECTURE: BEATRIZ COLOMINA

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.

The focus of the exhibition is on a set of specially-conceived works by internationally-acclaimed artists Nairy Baghramian, Anna Barriball, Barbara Bloom, Katarina Burin, Alexandra Leykauf, and Amie Siegel.

Over the course of the show, a series of events will take place in the building—film projections, talks and performances—which further the exhibition’s propositional discourse with the building.

On view February 14 –April 7, 2013

Beatriz Colomina: "Towards a Global Architect"

Thursday, February 21
6 pm
reception to follow

Air travel was revolutionized in the late1950s with the arrival of commercial jetliners. Le Corbusier saw the collapse of traditional space and time as nothing less than the emergence of a new kind of human. En route to India, in his favorite airplane seat, he notes: “January 5, 1960. I am settled in my seat by now acquired number 5, -alone, admirable one-man seat, total comfort. In fifty years we have become a new animal on the planet.” This posthuman is an animal that flies, the airline network is its “efficient nervous system,” its web covering the globe. The hyper-mobile architect is a symptom of a globalized society in which humanity will be necessarily transformed.

Colomina is an internationally renowned architectural historian and theorist who has written extensively on questions of architecture and media. Colomina has taught in the Princeton School of Architecture since 1988, and is the Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University, a graduate program that promotes the interdisciplinary study of forms of culture that came to prominence during the last century and looks at the interplay between culture and technology.

This exhibition was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.