How do we inhabit the spaces we inherit? As a contemporary institution stewarding three historic Schindler sites, MAK Center’s mission and work encompasses a broad set of approaches to our sites, spaces, and places, often entangled with both past and present concerns: critical and experimental exhibition-making, arts and architecture organizing and pedagogy, critical preservation practices, site stewardship and climate awareness.

Every institution is a proposition, on how we understand and define art and architecture, how we inhabit preservation and heritage sites, how we uphold cultural values, how we organize resources and relations across constituencies, and most importantly, how we engage with one another’s ideas and processes. 

Yet institutions are also notoriously slow moving, bureaucratic machines. The act of changing perspectives, attitudes, and conduct runs counter to the longevity and repetition of systems often developed to make institutions work. Such systems also demand invisible forms of labor not evident in the economy of exhibitions and events that institutions put forward. 

Reorientations invites dialogue between artists, architects, and cultural experts and MAK Center in order to address such forms of institutional labor and collaborative practice, beyond the public presentation of projects and work, with the aim of cultivating porosity and permeability within administrative and care-taking practices of the institution and its publics.

ABOUT SUBJECT STUDIES

Subject Studies is a new annual program series offering practical and non-practical public engagements, initiated by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture. The program series brings together artists, architects, public intellectuals, scholars, students, and cultural and political leaders to exchange dialogue on social values, methods and thought relevant to contemporary issues in art and architecture. The term “subject” implies a topic or field of knowledge studied or taught in traditional educational settings such as schools, colleges, or universities; it also implies a personhood situated in systems of power, whether institutional, economic, or material, and a consciousness of experience. Subject Studies embraces this possibility of multiple definitions, asking how knowledge, institutions and personhood intersect and are negotiated.

JIA YI GU

Jia Yi Gu is a curator, scholar, and exhibition-maker working at the intersections of art and architecture. Her work focuses on histories of knowledge production and display practices across disciplines, with an emphasis on objects, exhibitions, and representational histories. Over the past decade, she has developed a pedagogical and curatorial practice centering on research-based exhibitions and the production of situations and environments, alongside the critique and transformation of institutional practices. She is director of MAK Center for Art and Architecture and co-director of Spinagu.

ROSARIO TALEVI

Rosario Talevi is a Berlin-based architect, curator, editor and educator interested in critical spatial practice (Rendell), transformative pedagogies and feminist futures. Her work advances architecture as a form of agency – in its transformative sense and in its capacity for acting otherwise (Schneider) and as a form of care – one that provides the political stakes to repair our broken world (Tronto). Rosario is a founding member of Soft Agency, a diasporic group of female architects, artists, curators, scholars and writers working with spatial practices and Floating e.V., the non-for-profit association organising, programming and maintaining Floating University in Berlin. She was Guest Professor of Social Design (2021-22) at the Hochschule für bildende Künste (HFBK) in Hamburg. Currently, she is a fellow at the Thomas Mann Haus in Los Angeles, California.

This program is supported in part by the Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles (DCA), PICE AC/E's Programme for the Internationalization of Spanish Culture and Thomas Mann House.

Image Credit: TAKK Architecture.