So-called Utopias
November 20, 2015 - June 10, 2016
Sreshta Rit Premnath, Plot, 2015, Photocopies on corrugated plastic, sand and iron on rubber, aluminum tubes, measuring tape. Photo by Clare Britt.
Reception: Fri, Nov 20, 6-9pm
Featuring special reading by Sreshta Rit Premnath
Logan Center Gallery
So-called Utopias is an international group exhibition that examines the intersection of utopian visions with postcolonial and postindustrial sites. Presenting contemporary artworks across video, photography, drawing and sculpture, this exhibition features works by Jonathas de Andrade, Sammy Baloji, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Sreshta Rit Premnath and Melanie Smith, among others. Traversing the dense forests of Amazonia to the urban sprawl of Bangalore, So-called Utopias casts the built environment as an act of failure in the pursuit of expansionist and nationalist ideals.
Curated by Yesomi Umolu, Logan Center Exhibitions Curator.
Presented by Logan Center Exhibitions.
So-called Utopias is proud to be a part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial at the University of Chicago.
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Jonathas de Andrade (born 1982, Maceió, Brazil) lives in Recife, Brazil and works with installations, videos, and photo research. His works explore constructs of love and the process of urbanization, with an emphasis on Brazil’s northeast region.
Sammy Baloji (born 1978, Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo) lives and works in Lubumbashi. His works combine video, photography, and archival documents to explore architecture and the human body as traces of social history, sites of memory, and witnesses to operations of power.
LaToya Ruby Frazier (born 1982, Braddock, Pennsylvania) works in photography, video, and performance to build visual archives that address industrialism, rustbelt revitalization, environmental justice, healthcare inequity, family, and communal history. She is currently an assistant professor of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Sreshta Rit Premnath (born 1979, Bangalore, India) works across photography, video, and sculpture, investigating systems of representation to understand and challenge the process by which images become icons or events become history. He is based in Brooklyn and is an assistant professor at Parsons, New York.
Melanie Smith (born 1965, Poole, England) lives and works in Mexico City. She produces installations, videos, films, photographs, and paintings that reflect her interest in the legacies of modernism and post-avant-garde movements as they manifest themselves in Latin America.
