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The Artists & Architects-in-Residence Program at the Mackey Apartments is funded by the Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport, in cooperation with the MAK — Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, with additional support from the Austrian Consulate General Los Angeles.

Alongside the radical visioning of buildings, architects have also re-envisioned the index of people, bodies, figures, and actors that populate their buildings. In Unfinished Encyclopedia of Scale Figures, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of MOS indexed over 2000 people found in architectural drawings, collages, sketches, and renders. “It is impossible to represent architecture without representing the human,” writes MOS. Their accompanying work Selfie Curtain is an interactive textile work that gathers these bodies into a playful procession. 

Your Restroom is a Battleground (YRIAB) is a collaboration between Matilde Cassani, Ignacio G. Galán, Iván L. Munuera, Joel Sanders examining bathrooms as sites of protest. Originally exhibited as a dioramic model in conjunction with the Restroom Pavilion in the 2021 Venice Biennale, YRIAB presents seven stories of bathrooms as contested spaces around the globe. Rather than treat restrooms as glorified utility closets, the project insists on acknowledging the entanglement of policy, finance, race, gender, ability, health and environment in those spaces. By examining toilets as technological sites, YRIAB show how design and policy deny, exclude, or overdetermine certain bodies that need to excrete. 

Erotica Generica is an ongoing research project by Strat Coffman that examines commercial fixtures and standard codes of architecture as sites where bodily elements such as bacteria, oils, and heat are transferred. Queering our understanding of generic fixtures, Coffman explores how everyday objects such as stair handles, doorknobs, and grips can be re-envisioned as intimate sites of transfer between one body to another. By accommodating acts of touching, architecture relishes in, rather than represses, its capacity to open pathways for anonymous contact. 

Curated by MAK Center Director Jia Yi Gu, the exhibition takes place in the Schindler House, an early modernist experiment that married the body to the natural environment. By centering new definitions in bodily rights, experiences, and forms, the exhibition brings contemporary practices working on the architectural governance of the body into conversation with early modernist ideas at the Schindler House.

Artists

MOS

MOS is a New York–based architecture studio, founded by principals Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample in 2005. An internationally recognized architecture practice, MOS was the recipient of the 2015 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum National Design Award in Architecture, the 2010 American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, and the 2008 Architectural League of New York Emerging Voices Award. Individual works have similarly received numerous awards and distinctions, most notably: the 2015 Global Holcim Award for sustainable construction (Asia-Pacific Region) for Community Center No. 3 (Lali Gurans Orphanage); the cover of Abitare and an AIA NY State Award of Excellence for School No. 1 (Krabbesholm Højskole), the 2014 accession of both the firm’s modular, off-grid House No. 5 (Museum of Outdoor Arts Element House) into The Museum of Modern Art, Architecture and Design Collection; the acquisition of House No. 3 (Lot No. 6/Ordos) into the permanent collection of The Art Institute of Chicago; and the selection of Pavilion No. 4 (Afterparty) for the 2009 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program. Recent work includes: House No. 10, a private residence in Upstate New York; an all-aluminum open-air school for children in Versailles, France; and the Laboratorio de Vivienda, a 9-acre master plan and welcome center in Apan, Mexico. Recent and forthcoming publications, both products of and surveys on MOS’s work, include MOS: Selected Works (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016); El Croquis No. 184 (2016); An Unfinished Encyclopedia of Scale Figures Without Architecture (MIT Press, 2019); and Houses for Sale (CCA/Corraini, 2019).

YOUR RESTROOM IS A BATTLEGROUND

Your Restroom Is A Battleground builds upon the collective experience of the four participating teams. Matilde Cassani addresses toilets in the framework of her interest in the spatial implications of everyday multiculturalism in the contemporary Western city. Ignacio G. Galán considers the relationship of architecture and politics and frames the study of restrooms in response to assimilationist and technocratic ideologies —following his work on nationalism and migration and his interest in critical access and anti-ableism. Ivan L. Munuera explores the intersection between culture, technology, politics, and bodily practices, understanding restrooms as collective embodiments, challenging their materiality to understand them as both infiltrating and being infiltrated by technologies, beings, regulations, and policies. The contribution of Joel Sanders, principal of JSA/MIXdesign is informed by Stalled!, a cross-disciplinary design/research project consisting of toolkits and prototypes for safe, accessible public restrooms that meet the needs of differently embodied and identified people regardless of age, gender, race, faith or disability.

STRAT COFFMAN

Strat Coffman uses the multi-facing tools of architecture to explore how capital, institutions, and design discourses conspire to produce material, social, and epistemic bodies. They were a 2022-2024 Architecture Fellow at University of Michigan. They hold a BA from Wesleyan University and M.Arch from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they received the Imre Halasz Thesis Prize and the AIA Henry Adams Medal. They have also received the 2024 Architectural League Prize. Their work has appeared in Log, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the Multimedia Anthropology Lab at University College London. They were previously an editor of Thresholds 48: Kin, a fellow at the MIT Transmedia Storytelling Initiative, and a 2023 artist-in-residence at the Goethe Institut.

Exhibition Guide

Please click here to download the exhibition guide to Entourage.

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Entourage is made possible, with generous support from the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture and the California Arts Council

Hours

OPENING RECEPTION FOR FINAL PROJECTS: LIV

Mackey Apartments and Garage Top
Thursday, March 7, 6pm - 8pm

ANNA-SOPHIE BERGER AND BIANCA GAMSER EXHIBITIONS

Mackey Apartments and Garage Top
Friday, March 8 — Sunday, March 10, 1 pm-5 pm

EVAN IFEKOYA INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION

Original Muscle Beach, Santa Monica
16 Arcadia Terrace
Santa Monica, CA 90401
Friday, March 8 and Saturday, March 9, 11 am-2 pm

Mackey Apartments and Garage Top
Sunday, March 10, 2 pm-6 pm

Artists

ANNA-SOPHIE BERGER

Drawing from her 2022 exhibition in Mexico City titled Wealth and Propriety, Anna-Sophie Berger continues her investigation into historical and contemporary notions of sumptuary laws and the economical relevance of scarcity as it pertains to materials in general and to clothing and fabric specifically. Berger devised a faux-scientific graph that connects clothing styles and dimensions with economic and moral qualities: length pertaining to relative wealth, width pertaining to relative propriety. In an initial series of graphic wall pieces, she labeled the roughly body sized line drawings based on her graph with corresponding word combinations such as “wealthy and lewd” or “poor and proper”. 

The new series for her project in LA attempts the abstraction of these line drawings into graphic shapes applied in fabric based stitched wall panels and by consequence a blurring of their if purely fictional pretension at the legibility of clothing signs.

Anna-Sophie Berger (b. 1989, Vienna, Austria) is an artist living and working in New York and Vienna. She has had solo exhibitions at MAK, Vienna (2023); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2020); Cell Project Space, London (2019); MUMOK, Vienna (2016); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2016); Ludlow 38, NY (2015); White Flag Projects, St. Louis (2015); and Belvedere21, Vienna (2014); among others. She has recently participated in group exhibitions at the Pictures Collection of the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (2022); The Glucksman, Cork (2022); MACRO Museum, Rome (2021); MAK, Austria (2019); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2019); Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem (2018); S.M.A.K., Ghent (2018); Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2018); Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2017); Kunstverein Munchen, Munich (2017). She is the recipient of the 2017 Ars Viva Fine Arts Prize in Germany and the 2016 Kapsch Contemporary Art Prize, Austria and a 2023 recipient of the Pollock Krasner grant.

BIANCA GAMSER

Utilizing origin myths about the beginning of architecture, Bianca Gamser works to interrogate these supposed narratives, dating back to Vitruvius. At their core, this historical framing works in two parts, to separate humans from their natural environment; architecture as a shelter from weather; and to build a position to rebuke; the modernist incorporation of surroundings into the architecture itself. The latter can also be seen in R.M. Schindler’s writings, “The man of the future does not try to escape the elements. He will rule them.” Through the lens of contemporary construction practices and its harmful effects on the environment, the notion of architecture providing refuge from nature has turned into its active destruction of the natural environment. The effects can also be seen through unusual weather patterns, including recents years of heavy rainfall in Southern California, following years of drought. 

Gamser ties these ideas together by making the architecture itself the collection site and source of rainfall. Rather than architecture as a protective force from the natural environment, R.M. Schindler’s Modernist Mid-City Mackey Apartments functions as the ecosystem which produces rain. Here the separations outlined in the origin myth dissolve to create a holistic architecture that works with the environment, rather than against it.  

Bianca Gamser, is a Vienna-based architect and art historian who studied at both the Vienna University of Technology and the University of Vienna. Gamser's work aims to highlight potentials and grievances through the tools of architecture, often through interventions in public space.

She has participated in exhibitions and workshops in Europe, including the Lakeside Dancers Club, based on a design by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, Atelier Bow-Wow for HORST arts & music festival in Holsbeek, at the Vienna Biennale with the installation Ephemeral Temporalities and the Vienna Design Week with the group work VEBSHTUL. Several of her works, including her latest installation STILL FRIEDEN were awarded with grants and special recognitions. Besides her artistic practice at the intersection of art and architecture, Gamser has been active in various Viennese collectives, works as a set designer and has taught at the Vienna University of Technology.

EVAN IFEKOYA

Thursday, March 7, 6-8pm, Mackey Apartments 
Friday, March 8, 11am-2pm, Original Muscle Beach, Santa Monica
Saturday, March 9, 11am-2pm, Original Muscle Beach, Santa Monica
Sunday, March 10, 2-6pm, Mackey Apartments

Through their engagement with the city, Evan Ifekoya traces the history of Los Angeles public exercise spaces and centers strength training as a physical and spiritual guide. As public spaces that focus on the development and presentation of the body, Ifekoya prioritizes bodies that are often marginalized from these spaces. 

Constructing an intervention over two sites, their live/work space at the Mackey Apartments and Original Muscle Beach, Santa Monica, Ifekoya brings ‘Calabash, Kettlebell and Cascarilla’ - an interactive installation and guided audio journey.

At the Original Muscle Beach, Santa Monica (the 1930s era outdoor gym, not to be confused with the later Muscle Beach Venice Beach) Ifekoya brings an interactive sound installation and provides guidance on pull up progressions and other ways of making use of the equipment. With an emphasis on the importance of good technique and form; this interactive installation offers affirmation, encouragement, and support within an intimidating environment for those not familiar.  

Through these interventions, Ifekoya makes a ceremony of adaptation and strength, creating a dialogue between notions of health and harmony.

Evan Ifekoya is an interdisciplinary artist seeking greater embodiment for all, through sound. Their work in community organizing, installation, performance, text and video is an extension of their calling as a spiritual practitioner. They view art as a site where resources can be both redistributed and renegotiated, whilst challenging the implicit rules and hierarchies of public and social space. Strategies of space holding through architectural interventions, ritual and immersive sonic installations enable them to make a practice of living in order not to turn to despair.

They established the collectively run and QTIBPOC (queer, trans*, intersex, black and people of color) led Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.) in 2018. Upcoming presentations include immersive installations for ARoS Denmark (2023), Lagos Biennial and ICA VCU (both 2024). They have presented exhibitions, moving image and performances across UK, Europe and Internationally, most recently: Guest Artist Space Lagos (2023), a solo exhibition at Migros Museum, Zurich and a moving image commission with LUX in collaboration with University of Reading (2022); Herbert Art Gallery and Museum as nominees of the Turner Prize (with B.O.S.S. 2021); Gus Fischer New Zealand (2020); De Appel Netherlands (2019) and Gasworks London (2018).

The Artists & Architects-in-Residence Program at the Mackey Apartments is funded by the Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport, in cooperation with the MAK — Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna.

Working across the mediums of performance, film, photography, video, sculpture, and installations, EXPORT’s work engages with the construction and representation of the female body, confronting ideas of sexuality, intimacy, and transgression in both private and public arenas. Her first solo presentation in Los Angeles since 2001, the exhibition centers on EXPORT's early artistic explorations, expanding on the production of meaning and materiality in film, photography, and performance, while challenging the social function of women and the ideologies of space and the built environment.

The exhibition positions these influential works in dialogue with a contemporary performance program featuring Los Angeles-based artists responding to VALIE EXPORT’s work and the Schindler House.

VALIE EXPORT

A pioneer in film, video and installation art, VALIE EXPORT has produced one of the most significant bodies of feminist art in the post-war period. Her groundbreaking films and performances in the 1960s and 1970s introduced a new form of radical, embodied feminism to Europe, examining the politics of the body in relation to its environment, culture and society. The multi-disciplinary nature of EXPORT's 'Expanded Cinema' practice and use of her own body as an artistic medium positions her as one of the earliest performance artists alongside Joseph Beuys and Allan Kaprow.

VALIE EXPORT lives and works in Vienna, where she co-founded the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative. Since 1968, she has taken part in numerous international exhibitions, including documenta 6 and 12 (1977 and 2007) and the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1980. In recent years, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2020); Neue Berliner Kunstverein (2018); Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz (2017); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2011); Belvedere Museum, Vienna (2010); Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2009); and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2007) have devoted major solo exhibitions to her work. EXPORT has taught at a number of international institutions, including the University of Wisconsin, San Francisco Art Institute and University of the Arts in Berlin. From 1995–2005 she was professor of multimedia and performance at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. In 2019, she was awarded the Roswitha Haftmann Prize in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the visual arts. VALIE EXPORT received the Max-Beckmann-Prize of the City of Frankfurt 2022. 

VALIE EXPORT: Embodied is organized by MAK Center Director Jia Yi Gu with Seymour Polatin, Exhibitions and Programs Manager, Brian Taylor, Curatorial Assistant, and Maeve Atkinson, Education and Engagement Coordinator. 

The performance program In Their Own Image is curated by Chloë Flores and features new work by performing artists Zackary Drucker, Sierra Fujita, Emily Lucid, Lara Salmon, Andrea Soto, and Dorian Wood. The program is in partnership with homeLA.

The exhibition and program is made possible with support from Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Betsy Greenberg, the Austrian Consulate General Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Arts and Culture Department, and MAK Center’s Centennial Council.

From “instant pictures” to “rapidraw” systems, the items crowding the architect’s desk from the mid-century reflected a preoccupation with speed and efficiency. With a flourishing of supplies and materials that transformed the work of many in the graphic fields, this was a period in which architects engaged widely with technologies of printing and printmaking. Whether in the service of the distribution of working drawings, or in the making of carefully stamped lithographic multiples, architects worked to make their architecture print ready.

Through a selection of 12 case studies, Print Ready Drawings highlights these miniature paper landscapes. Across their surfaces are expressions of control: annotation marks, enlargement instructions, manufacturer tags, and watermarks, along with evidence of any number of unacknowledged contributors.

Drawings in this exhibition are viewed as microcosms of the material world, and their convergence in each document tells a social and production history of architectural work. Their organization into technical affinities produces curious pairings, like Lina Bo Bardi and Roger Katan, whose magazine cover designs constitute parallel case studies of contextual and material appropriation. Other groupings include scientific illustrator Gloria Brown Simmons, Eames Office, and Herbert Bayer’s World Geo-Graphic Atlas.

Print Ready Drawings also includes a variety of production ephemera, technical manuals, and samples, alongside artist’s films that turned the camera inward towards the process itself, including Richard Serra’s Color-Aid film. Several drawings featured in the exhibition, considered too fragile to be exhibited, are replicated through a process of material and technical research in conservation labs, manufacturing workshops, eBay, and oral histories. This research is documented in films made by Julie Riley and Jenny Leavitt that interpret and translate historical materials and modes of making.

The site of architectural authorship has long been found in drawings. By anonymizing the technical and foregrounding original marks and signatures, drawings played a crucial role in prioritizing cognitive acts over material labor — thus obscuring their intersection. This exhibition examines the architectural drawing as the arena of architectural work—the mundane, the repetitive, and the documents that convey how architects navigate the borders between private work and what is destined to be public.

Print Ready Drawings is curated by Sarah Hearne, with curatorial assistance by Arianna Borromeo and support from the MAK Center exhibitions team Seymour Polatin, Exhibitions and Programs Manager and Brian Taylor, Curatorial Assistant. The exhibition features commissioned films by Julie Riley and Jenny Leavitt. Exhibition design is by Current Interests with conservation support from Paradise Framing. Graphic design is by Christina Huang.

Installation images: Joshua Schaedel

Print Ready Drawings was made possible, in part, with generous support from the Getty Foundation’s Paper Project Series. Additional support was provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the University of Colorado Denver, College of Architecture and Planning.

There is something growing in the gallery. 

Nine years ago, Christian Kosmas Mayer planted a palm tree in the courtyard of the Mackey Apartments as part of MAK Center’s Artists and Architects-in-Residence Program. The residency ended and moved on to the subsequent groups of residents, but the palm tree remained, under the care of the institution, where it remains today.

In this exhibition, Christian Kosmas Mayer, joined by Los Angeles-based artist Gala Porras-Kim, revisits this living sculpture for an in-depth exploration of the functions and roles of the art institution. Both Mayer and Porras-Kim utilize the exhibition space as a site to foster discourse and critique how art institutions exercise forms of care within collecting practices. The MAK Center is a unique context as it is a non-collecting exhibition space, but it preserves and cares for three R. M. Schindler designed properties in Los Angeles. In this sense, the exhibition spaces are the collection.

This unique relationship between exhibition space and care practice forms the basis of and yet you grow. Porras-Kim's Forecasting Signal is a site-activated sculpture that extracts ambient water from the gallery environment and filters it through a hanging burlap sheet saturated with graphite, extended from the ceiling. As the water accumulates, it drips through the material onto a panel where it makes an image. This process occurs repeatedly through the duration of the exhibition, and turns the exhibition space itself into what could be considered a process-based drawing. 

In dialogue with Forecasting Signal is Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing, which also utilizes the environmental conditions of the space, introducing spores from the British Museum storage onto muslin fabric, encased within an acrylic shell. Over the course of the exhibition, a mold grows from these spores and becomes increasingly visible. While the spores originate from the British Museum, an institution with a long and fraught history of collecting practices, the mold grows in the exhibition at the MAK Center’s Mackey Apartment Garage Top Gallery, raising questions about the interconnectedness of art institutions.

Along with the palm tree, Mayer brings another tree into this exhibition, a sapling he grew in 2016 from the acorn of a majestic oak tree that lives in the yard of a small family house in Los Angeles’s Koreatown. This oak, one of the renowned 'Olympic Oaks' presented to all gold medal winners at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, was planted by African American high jump champion Cornelius Johnson upon his return home. Over time, the historical significance of this tree was lost until Mayer uncovered this hidden history through his research. 

Over the course of two years, Mayer worked in collaboration with the MAK Center and the California African American Museum for the preservation of this tree, resulting in its designation as a Historic Cultural Monument by the City of Los Angeles in 2022. However, despite this achievement, the destiny of the Olympic oak remains uncertain as the tree has declined in health due to neglect from a new property owner. Now, the young potted oak included in this exhibition, may soon be the solitary living ancestor to this historic legacy. 

In and yet you grow, Mayer and Porras-Kim work to reposition the roles of the artist as life givers, and question the traditional role of the curator as collection caretaker safeguarding inanimate objects. Both of these works by Porras-Kim have been exhibited before in other institutions, but each retain a site specificity based on the environmental conditions in which they are shown. Complementing these pieces, Mayer’s site-specific interventions continue his investigation of institutional responsibility and break down the traditional roles of artist practice, curatorship, and architectural intervention. In the context of the palm tree, which now has become a part of the Mackey Apartments, Mayer inverts the Modern critique of museums being places where art dies, and situates the art institution as a site for continued life. In this exhibition, the MAK Center becomes a nursery—birthing, feeding, and parenting artworks with a life of their own. 

ABOUT GARAGE EXCHANGE

Garage Exchange Vienna—Los Angeles seeks to foster relationships, conversations and collaborations in the arts between Los Angeles and Austria. In order to expand the cultural exchange at the core of the Artists and Architects-in-Residence program, the Austrian Federal Chancellery and the MAK Center invite Austrian and Vienna-based alumni residents to collaborate with L.A. artists and architects of their choosing at the Garage Top at the Mackey Apartments for the Garage Exchange Vienna-Los Angeles exhibition series.

Artists

Christian kosmas mayer

Christian Kosmas Mayer (b. 1976, Sigmaringen, Germany) lives and works in Vienna, Austria. His work produces and preserves a constellation of narratives about historical remains and representations that are often on the verge of disappearing, or have already been rendered imperceptible. Mayer’s projects, which are the outcome of extensive artistic research and close collaborations with specialists across various disciplines, transform the minor, forgotten, and obsolescent into material artifacts, discursive objects, multi-media installations, and performances. Linking technology to memory and care, his practice explores the methods by which important issues can be approached in conceptually and aesthetically surprising ways: techniques of reversal, of compressing and stretching time, of looking at things from both ends at once. 

He has had solo exhibitions at Vienna’s mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria ; Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria; Austrian Cultural Forum New York, USA; MAK Center, Los Angeles, USA; University Gallery of the Custody, Dresden, Germany; Zamek Culture Center, Poznan, Poland; Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, Germany; Austrian Cultural Forum Warsaw, Poland; Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin, Germany; Galerie Mezzanin, Geneva, Switzerland and participated in biennales and group exhibitions such as the 26th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil; Manifesta 7, Rovereto, Italy; Vienna Biennale 2019, Austria; Biennale Gherdëina 2016, Italy; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany; Marta Herford, Germany; Leopoldmuseum, Vienna, Austria; Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles, USA; ZKM I Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria; Secession, Vienna, Austria; and numerous other venues.

Gala Porras-Kim

Gala Porras-Kim (b. 1984, Bogotá) lives and works in Los Angeles and London. Her work is about the social and political contexts that influence how intangible things, such as sounds, language and history, have been framed through the fields of linguistics, history and conservation. The work considers the way institutions shape inherited codes and forms and conversely, how objects can shape the contexts in which they are placed. 

Porras-Kim received an MFA from CalArts and an MA in Latin American Studies from UCLA. She has had solo exhibitions at Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City, The Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Seville, Kadist, Amant Foundation, Gasworks, London, and CAMSTL, and upcoming at Leeum Museum of Art and MMCA, Seoul, MCA Denver, and Carnegie Museum of Art. Her work has been included in the Whitney Biennial and Ural Industrial Biennial (2019), and Gwangju and Sao Paulo Biennales (2021) and Liverpool Biennial (2023). She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019), the artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020-22), and currently a fellow at Museo delle Civiltà in Rome.

This exhibition series is made possible by The Austrian Federal Chancellery.

Installation images: Tag Christof.