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May 16 2023
Surface
Design Dispatch
Lesley Lokko is focused on the future, We Are Ona toasts New York Art Week, and a giant scrotum flower.
FIRST THIS
“Isn’t it exciting to have somebody reinterpret something in a modern way?”
HERE’S THE LATEST

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Lesley Lokko, the Venice Biennale Curator, Is Focused on the Future

What’s Happening: Under the curation of decorated architect and academic Lesley Lokko, this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale seeks to highlight Africa’s outsize impact on the global architecture stage through a slate of emerging firms with fresh ideas.

The Download: For the first time since the Venice Biennale established an architecture event in 1980, its main exhibitions will focus on Africa and the African Diaspora. That’s largely thanks to Ghanaian-Scottish architect and academic Lesley Lokko, who was tapped to curate this year’s edition. Much like the Diaspora, which she describes in her curatorial statement as “that fluid and enmeshed culture of people of African descent that now straddles the globe,” Lokko’s freewheeling career has been defined by inhabiting—and navigating—many different worlds.

Primarily raised in Accra, Lokko attended boarding school in coastal Dundee. An alumnus of London’s Bartlett School of Architecture who jokes that she “can’t even change a light bulb,” she stepped away from the profession to write romantic fiction imbued with questions about race for more than a decade before returning to teach at the University of Johannesburg in 2014. There, she noticed a “hunger for change” rocking campuses across South Africa, with students protesting unjust education disparities and calling for decolonization. She also noticed there were no Black architecture students, prompting her to found the university’s influential graduate school of architecture and, back in Accra, the African Futures Institute.


These achievements laid the groundwork for this year’s Venice Biennale, fittingly titled “The Laboratory of the Future.” Eighty-nine participants—more than half hailing from Africa, and averaging an age of 43—will explore the continent’s impact on the global architecture stage through a “shape-shifting” approach that stretches to encompass film, journalism, adaptive reuse, land reclamation, and grassroots practice. Among them are bold names like Diébédo Francis Kéré and David Adjaye; they’re in dialogue with emerging practitioners like Sumayya Vally of Counterspace, poet Rhael “Lionheart” Cape, and visual artist Olalekan Jeyifous.

Details are largely under wraps until the press opening on May 18, but expect programming that highlights Africa’s “ability to be several things at once—traditional and modern, African and global, colonized and independent,” Lokko tells the New York Times. “We’re used to having to think about resources, about switching on a light with no guarantee of electricity. We’re able to grapple with change.” (To that end, she called out the Italian government for refusing entry to three of her team members a mere weeks before the exhibition opening.)


As opposed to Biennales that sought to bring people together in the face of environmental calamity, public health crises, and rapid urbanization, Lokko posits the global South as a harbinger of innovation—an intentionally open-ended approach that also aims to expand hackneyed notions of African architecture. Wakanda, the fictional utopian city in the Black Panther movies, might come to mind. Lokko wants to dig deeper and find out “what Wakanda would look like after 10 years of thinking about the relationship between the future and technology, or between sustainability and social justice or public health, so it doesn’t look like Dubai on steroids.” This Biennale may not have all the answers—but perhaps that’s the point.

In Their Own Words: “When you’re African, you speak to a world that has an existing view of who and what you are,” Lokko says. “You walk with this kind of label. So for me, the Biennale was an opportunity to both talk about the label, to confront it in a way, but to also show underneath how similar we are.”

Surface Says: Looks like the Italian government didn’t grasp last edition’s theme of “how will we live together?”

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What Else Is Happening?

Check-Circle_2xHeritage quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, are bringing their work to the blockchain.
Check-Circle_2x Yayoi Kusama’s latest exhibition at David Zwirner is drawing Instagram-hungry crowds.
Check-Circle_2x A new survey finds that 82 percent of Americans want to work from home part-time.
Check-Circle_2xFactory International, an OMA-designed cultural hub in Manchester, opens in October.
Check-Circle_2x New York City is considering legislation aimed at reducing nighttime light pollution.
Check-Circle_2x Seeking a digital detox and healthier habits, Gen Z is moving away from smartphones.


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SURFACE APPROVED

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Galerie Ground Presents “Chris Baas: Adagio” for NYCxDesign

Join Surface and Galerie Ground on May 18 for cocktails to celebrate the opening of “Adagio,” an exhibition of sculptural reliefs by artist-architect Chris Baas. In his latest series of visceral works, Baas aims to recreate a sense of slowness by using forms that seem to be suspended in a weightless environment. As the name adagio suggests, the collection intends to serve as a remedy to the fast-paced, flat world of digital screens in favor of a slower pace of being—a reprieve from the frenetic nature of NYCxDesign.

“Adagio” will inaugurate the opening of Galerie Ground’s new location in Red Hook (80 Richards St) following the gallery’s successful Los Angeles debut in 2021. Be sure to RSVP now, and keep scrolling to read our Designer of the Day interview with Baas.

DESIGN

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Lindsey Adelman Is Getting Even More Experimental

The idea came to Lindsey Adelman during a weeklong silent meditation retreat last fall. To complement her practice, the New York design sphere’s reigning queen of sculptural lighting would launch LaLAB, a studio-within-a-studio focused on making experimental works unfettered by agenda. “LaLAB is a refuge for discovery and surprise, one where I bring the concept of illumination to an unexplored plane. There’s power in a change of perspective,” she says, and shedding the hardness of what’s fixed to let the soft parts show.

Milan Design Week attendees experienced that power firsthand at “Soft Opening,” where Adelman debuted three new series of illuminated works that forged a celestial vibe inside experimental hotbed Alcova’s setup in a dilapidated former abattoir. Principles of equilibrium informed the hanging Mobiles, adorned with precious minerals infused with metaphysical properties, while the exacting angular frames of her Cages struck a visual vibration. “I love the tension between the luxuriousness of each element and the playful treatment and arrangement,” she says, “handling serious objects in a non-serious way.”


The sequel, “Under the Influence,” makes a compelling case for this non-serious approach. Taking over her NoHo atelier during NYCxDesign is a hanging forest of Mobiles, grandly scaled galactic Cages, and earthy Rock Lights accompanied by dozens of earthly gray ceramics and meditative gouache paintings that delicately reveal her hand on paper. Each is set against an immersive 13-minute film that serves as a portal to the vast, mysterious landscapes of the desert—and brings its brilliant hues of light into focus. “As someone who tends to be airy, dreaming, and in the clouds,” Adelman says, “I’m constantly looking for ways to ground in the earth, in reality.” Affording yourself the space to think freely may be the ticket.

DESIGNER OF THE DAY


A sense of slow, fluid movement permeates the work of Chris Baas, from the trained architect’s midcentury renovations in his hometown of San Diego to the protuberant sculptural reliefs he exhibits at Galerie Ground. The gallery’s founders, Kim Collins and Amy Morgenstern of Kamp Studios, discovered the latter when visiting his loft for a plaster install and resonated with their “sophisticated organicism.” Fast forward a few years, and Baas is gearing up to debut a fresh batch of work at the gallery’s new Brooklyn location during NYCxDesign under the theme of adagio—a nod to his musical inspirations and a desire to eschew our fast-paced digital life in favor of a slower tempo of being.

CULTURE CLUB

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We Are Ona’s Radiant Pop-Up Welcomes New York Art Week

Last week, Luca Pranzato’s culinary collective We Are Ona and Evian hosted a private dinner to celebrate Art Week in New York, as the city buzzes with activity around fairs like TEFAF, Independent, and Frieze. Guests from the city’s creative cognoscenti gathered on the 28th floor of WSA, a new cultural hub set inside an abandoned building in Lower Manhattan, to mingle over cocktails and enjoy Michelin-starred chef Mory Sacko’s eight-course dinner in a glowing pop-up restaurant envisioned by Harry Nuriev of Crosby Studios.

When was it? May 12

Where was it? WSA, New York

Who was there? Alex Tieghi-Walker, Andy Baraghani, Beverly Nguyen, Kennedy Yanko, Chloe Wise, Dozie Kanu, Rafael Prieto, Quil Lemons, Kimberly Drew, and more.

ARTIST STATEMENT

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A Giant Scrotum Flower Whispering Words of Wisdom

Ensconced between states of reflection and acceptance, the American debut of Theresa Chromati’s visceral “scrotum flower” recasts forward movement as an act of radical liberation.

Here, we ask an artist to frame the essential details behind one of their latest works.

Bio: Theresa Chromati, 30, Brooklyn.

Title of work: A Life to Be Lived Within This Deep Breath (I Am With You As We Take This Step Forward).

Where to see it: Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, until May 26.

Three words to describe it: Will, transient, support.

What was on your mind at the time: I was interested in building this scrotum flower up to celebrate movement and one’s ability to transition from one state to the next with acceptance. The black flower head turns back on itself as it steps forward to acknowledge where it’s been, all while exploring what’s up next. As the flower head gazes into the past, the viewer is reflected in their present form, with the space to spend time with the engraved affirmation “a life to be lived within this deep breath.” Perhaps then we all feel the freedom to move forward.

DESIGN

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ICYMI: Meet the World’s First AI-Powered Designer

One of Milan Design Week’s most forward-thinking concepts didn’t come in the form of a statement sofa, Instagrammable installation, or lamp-assembling robot. Instead, the innovation was projected on a large screen at the Charles Philip gallery space, where Australian firm Studio Snoop was presenting photographs of a slate of recent design concepts. One of them was Tilly Talbot, a human-like digital figure billed by founder Amanda Talbot as the world’s first AI designer.

Amanda created Tilly after pondering human loneliness, programming her under the studio’s principles of human-centered design that prioritizes nature. The program currently works at the firm as an “innovation designer” and collaborates with the studio’s human staff to conceive design objects. To that end, Tilly’s role seems successful: the five designs she was involved in creating include Bauhau-AI, a collection that melds Bauhaus principles with modern innovations (think a sinuous mycelium stool and hempcrete table.)

PARTNER WITH US

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THE LIST

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Member Spotlight:
d line

d line is a heritage Danish design brand that handcrafts enduring architectural hardware, sanitaryware, and barrier-free solutions. Its portfolio features blue-chip designers including Knud Holscher, Arne Jacobsen, and Bjarke Ingels, and is present in many celebrated buildings—from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to Copenhagen’s SAS Royal Hotel.

Surface Says: d line is an aptly named hardware company that connects Danish heritage to contemporary design. Its products embrace timeless midcentury minimalism, adding an understated sophistication to the architecture of today.

AND FINALLY

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Today’s Attractive Distractions

Andrew McIntosh’s paintings show run-down stores in the Scottish hills.

Just about every famous woman is being referred to as “mother” online.

Creatives share their advice on how to navigate the industry as introverts.

Vitra drops limited-edition Eames chairs that show Saul Steinberg’s cat.

               


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