About this Event
This exhibition considers the shifting legacy of African modernism through the afterlives of independence-era architecture. Once positioned as markers of a newly imagined modern Africa, many Brutalist and modernist structures now exist in states of weathering and transformation, revealing modernism as unstable, incomplete, and continually renegotiated. Rather than signaling failure, these conditions point to modernism as an ongoing and unresolved project shaped by political promise. In dialogue with Black diasporic histories across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, the work engages water, sound, and circulation as spatial forces that complicate architectural permanence.
Through sculptural works that engage concrete, replication, and embedded sonic elements, Jess Atieno (2023 Arts + Public Life Artist-in–Residence) considers architecture as an atmospheric and felt condition—with sound operating as presence. Space is experienced as continuous, immersive, disorienting, and inescapable yet ambient. The project treats modernism as an evolving formation shaped by environmental forces, infrastructural circulation, and lived spatial realities. It points toward expansive diasporic and circulatory formations of Black life that exceed fixed geography. Past, present, and future operate simultaneously, the future less a distant horizon than something already unfolding across material and environmental realities. In this moment, the exhibition asks viewers to consider how the present is shaped by what refuses to become past.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Washington Park Arts Incubator, 301 East Garfield Boulevard, Chicago, United States
USD 0.00
