Nelly Agassi: No Limestone No Marble / Chicago Cultural Center / September 24, 2022 — January 15, 2023
“The line between public and private no longer coincides with the outer limit of a building. We might even argue that the envelope is no longer to be found on the outside. It has coiled itself up within an imaginary body.”
–Beatriz Colomina, “Skinless Architecture,” 2003.
Nelly Agassi: No Limestone, No Marble was a site-specific exhibition of the work of Israeli-born, Chicago-based artist Nelly Agassi (b. 1973) developed in direct conversation with the Chicago Cultural Center’s “Chicago Rooms” gallery and the building as a whole.
Architectural discourse has from its beginning associated building and body; Agassi’s formulation requires that we abandon the traditional thought of architecture as object and start thinking of it as a system of representations just like drawings, collages, sculpture, and sound. Agassi’s artistic strategy is what she calls the “biography of the site” in which she develops a relationship between the past, present, and future history of a place and her personal history. With this methodology, Agassi “sculpts” the site as a material, and creates a project that includes the specificity of the place in relation to the city of Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center’s impact. She takes inspiration from the experiences of spending time on-site, researching the archives, and developing relationships with the institution’s staff. If most of Chicago’s historical architecture is known to be made with marble and limestone, then Agassi, with both large scale and intimate works, proposes to experience the site with alternative materials. Throughout the Chicago Rooms there is a process of domestication, an unmasking of the institutional, and a transgressive exploration of forbidden spaces. Agassi challenges the home/architecture opposition which has worked so hard for so long to gender our understanding of the relations between the body and buildings.
Installation Views: