The Brooklyn Rail

Architecture is a conversation between reason and ingenuity, where structures are engineered with social consideration to bring spatial, temporal elements into sound relationship. The fifth iteration of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB 5) performs similar acts of composition, bringing together uncertain, irresolute global futures by eighty-six thinkers spanning ten countries, curated by the city’s homegrown collective, Floating Museum (FM). Spurred by a shared commitment to exploring new relationships between art, architecture, and site-responsive (social) sculpture, Artistic Directors Faheem Majeed, avery r. young, Andrew Schachman, and Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford offer articulations of architectural emergence—at times representational, at others intentionally irresolute—bringing their propensity for operating on uncertain, often contradictory civic timelines. Recalibrating and rehearsing in real time, CAB 5’s “rehearsal” sets itself up for completion in the near future, flouting the idea of a total “deliverable,” proposing instead a lexicon of terms to address intersecting, sometimes conflicting global issues.

Slated to open September 2023, the biennial was revealed in phases with a reading rehearsal for patrons and partners, followed by a positioning rehearsal for the press. The official date switched around until curtains raised November 1, revealing moving, modular elements and live-time run-throughs, surfacing labor often relegated to the backstage. FM’s refusal of finality grew evident. From the addition of a laser cut, reimagined equestrian monument mounted atop an interactive cork pedestal—Paul Ramírez Jonas’s Division (2023); to Feda Wardak’s unconsummated landmark water tower for the Englewood community; to the imminent subtraction of Helmut Jahn’s seventeen-story post-modernist superstructure anticipated to be Google’s new headquarters, the narrative of CAB 5 circulates within its publics, shifting with every retelling.

The now-closed exhibit at the Thompson Center was organized as a rehearsal of publics. Suspended vertically down its multi-story glass and steel balconies, one finds Ghanaian textile artist Ibrahim Mahama’s jute and batik pennant-like paintings offsetting the center’s modernist blue and coral accents. Studio Inference’s biconcave metallic shell transformed the central atrium into a stage neighboring Dan Peterman’s recycled assemblage and an NPR Tiny Desk maquette. At the Joffrey Ballet, Jan Tichy restores names of those lost to racial violence, adapting William Walker’s erased mural All of Mankind – Why Were They Crucified? (1973). At the Graham Foundation, birdsong by Sigil Collective and Mapping Memories of Resistance, a project spurred by Daniel Ruiz and collaborators at the Birzeit University, London School of Economics, and Al-Marsad Arab Center for Human Rights, chronicles the dispossession of Syrian Jawlani communities in occupied Golan Heights. Using the biennial as a site for germinating made and unmade civic processes, identities and resistances, FM points to the problematic relationship between land, resources, and its people, conjuring political consciousness through the everyday vernacular of architecture.

In an official statement, the curators explain that This is a Rehearsal “aims to explore how certain contemporary environmental, political and economic issues are shared across national boundaries…” indicating a central motive—that we are mediating shared, complex, political territories, where architecture, as a field of relative dynamics, helps us draw inferences across complex positionalities. Moving from the objective truth of architecture to the subjective experience of location on a stage built for rehearsal, what is presented in the biennial is poetically and aesthetically multipolar yet self-conscious.

Illustrations of architectural processes are seldom straightforward. A cumulation of architectural drawings, digital renderings, and documentary footage fill the nucleus of the biennial at the Cultural Center. Etched renderings on plexiglass illustrate studio chahar’s study of traditional Lenj boat-building techniques in Sarzurzuma Pavilion. A series of framed graphite drawings of now-demolished public housing projects by Project Onward’s Kareem Davis hang against the pristine metal scaffolding of exhibition designer Leticia Pardo’s Ecotone (2023). Forming the connective tissue in what might have otherwise been a fractured response to FM’s curatorial caveat, Pardo's scaffolding repeats across three levels of the Cultural Center’s polished hardwood and mosaic flooring, serving as a platform for artistic and architectural research “in-progress” and alluding to the intrinsic relationship between material constructs and processes of labor. Untarnished yet fragmented, Ecotone binds a selection of work together in diachronic choreography. As Pardo and several Indigenous female collaborators are invited to work as thought partners within FM, the question of whether recognition or reciprocity are enough complicates the collective’s commitment to solidarity building. When one is pushing against the institutional-curatorial complex, do collaborative gestures set thought partners up for future success, beyond the timeline of collaboration?

Depending on how one navigates CAB 5, the biennial communicates the particularity of FM’s concerns. LOAD IN/LOAD OUT (2023), a stage for Lot-Ek’s Theater for One; The distance between two points is not always a straight line (2023) by SKETCH; and Gray Veil (2023) by William O’Brien Jr., speak to young’s penchant for building intimate and vulnerable experiences in public performance. Outdoor installations such as the Andrea Yarbrough, Alexx Temeña, Andrés Lemus-Spont, and Roland Knowlden designed House of Kapwa (2023); Edra Soto’s La Distancia (2023); and Norman Teague and Tonika Johnson’s Listening run apace with Majeed’s commitment to public sculpture. A monumental assembly of conceptual sculpture, informed by Hulsebos-Spofford’s practice, sits atop stepped EPS Geofoam pedestal cladding, occupying the entirety of the Cultural Center’s fourth floor. Unsurprisingly, Schachman’s presence is felt throughout the biennial’s overarching framework, as the designer’s focus on experimental, institutional environs touches both exhibition and programmatic strategies.

The question of whether the biennial is specific to the city as a stage for rehearsal, or if it can be seen as a stage for rehearsing resistances to the metrics of Western modernity, is debatable. Vyjayanthi V. Rao’s, Kush Badhwar’s, and Sagarika Sundaram’s film-based installation with soft, felted tent-like walls as its frame, Monumental Returns (2023), materializes research on the slow violence of development in South India’s Telangana region. Anupama Kundoo’s Building with fire: Volontariat Homes for Homeless Children (2008–10) reinforces Ray Meeker’s self-fired, water-resistant dome housing in Pondicherry as an in-progress model on site. Amanda Williams’s Redefining Redlining (2022) draws on a palimpsest of ephemera, documenting the planting of 100,000 red tulips that redraw the architectural footprint of twenty-one demolished homes on Prairie Avenue and 53rd Street. Protest site or tribute, participants “in-rehearsal” in their communities excavate the impact of generational divestment.

Oscillating between play and the sweat of rehearsal, set designer Ruth de Jong’s flush white Haywood House from the 2022 film Nope stands with six unopened studio-paste cans labeled “Blood.” A waste cardboard, dense cylindrical forest by studio Barkow Leibinger at the Cultural Center’s southern entrance suggests the self-consuming nature of compulsory consumerism. A tempest of black rubber tubing ingesting Pardo’s scaffolding—Asim Waqif’s Pretty Wrecked (2023) at the northern entryway—hints at the failings of industrial capitalism. Bridging artifice and real-world socioeconomic precarity, materials throughout the biennial point to ecological and anthropological concerns, overshadowing any semblance of a totalizing grand narrative as though FM has developed a predilection for the contingent, process-based advancement of artistic inquiry over linear, modernist rationale. The Cultural Center thus performs as a magnet, drawing upon histories and everyday experiences through architectural processes, interventions, and abstractions, enacted multiple times until points of difference grow amply clear.

As postponements occur in biennials internationally, how does the focus on “rehearsal” defer evaluation by providing a relative framework? Does postponed production, slower looking, and delayed response cultivate fertile grounds for self-determination against the impositions of Western modernity? Mapping uncharted connections between non-contiguous places, FM makes it possible for us to realize how collaborative, participatory, and uncertain futures intersect, making it possible, urgent and necessary to rethink the complexity of a world inherited by us all.