“Making Connections with Julie Mehretu” - Deen Sharp

Terreform Co-director and AKPIA@MIT Post-Doc Fellow Deen Sharp was in discussion with artist Julie Mehretu as part of a panel organized by the Aga Khan Program at MIT.

Panelists included:
Julie Mehretu, New York based artist
Miriam Cooke, Professor Emerita, Duke University
Asma Naeem, Curator, The Baltimore Museum of Art
Nasser Rabbat, Director, AKPIA@MIT
Deen Sharp, AKPIA@MIT Post-Doctoral Fellow

Published on Jun 12, 2019 by MIT Architecture

excerpt from Artscope Magazine:

….Sharp made the opening remarks and introduced the panel. Each panelist was tasked with responding to Mehretu’s two artworks inspired by the Arab Spring: “Mogamma,” a huge four-piece work produced during the early days of the Tahrir uprising that forced Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to step down and “Epigraph, Damascus,” a six-panel reaction to the Syrian Revolution in its fourth year of mortal struggle against the ruthless regime of Bashar al-Assad. Sharp’s talk “Marking Moments: The Actually Existing Third Space of Julie Mehretu” traced the progression of Mehretu’s work in “Mogamma,” “Cairo” and “Damascus, Epigraph.” He outlined how her marks documenting the uprisings shifted to marks making meaning out of the social chaos. “Mehretu … illuminates how we can see outwards by looking within; how tensions, contradictions and difference can exist together; how absences can create the most powerful presence; how the smallest mark can be the deepest,” said Sharp.

Early on in the process of putting together Beyond the Square, Deen had approached Julie Mehretu about including her work on Egypt–specifically, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (2012) and Cairo (2013). Asking her felt like a long shot so we were both over the moon when she agreed to be involved. (Co-editor Claire Panetta in Jadaliyya).

Beyond The Square: Urbanism and the Arab Uprising (Urban Research 05) Edited by Deen Sharp and Claire Panetta. With contributions from Khaled Adham; Susana Galán; Azam Khatam; C. Lanthier; Ed McAllister; Julie Mehretu; G. Ollamh; Duygu Parmaksizoglu; Aseel Sawalha; Helga Tawil-Souri. Cover art courtesy of Julie Mehretu, Marian Goodman Gallery. Cover design by Isaac Gertman / The Independent Group.

UR author at Gear Con

Invited Lecture: “Mahometan & Celestial LLC proudly presents: Who's the Brute?, or, a Hyalotypic Discourse & Dialogue on the Character of Civilization, now newly improved with the Addition of Parlour Games!” by UR author, Steven Flusty.

Gear Con, Portland’s Steampunk Extravaganza. DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Portland. 01 July 2017.

Steven Flusty and Pauline C. Yu are proprietors of Mahometan & Celestial LLC, a foremost purveyor of modernization to crowned heads the world over since the 18th of October 1860.

"The Calumet Collaborations" at SAIC

The Calumet Collaborations: Making Many Little Plans is a collective project of a group of architectural schools to investigate an enormous swath of de-industrialized land on the South Side of Chicago, with a supporting ecology that spans state boundaries from Illinois to Michigan. The project includes participants from the City College of New York, Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), SAIC, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Harvard University. Using an inductive strategy based on the design of a series of highly-sustainable neighborhoods and founded on a rigorous investigation of existing environments, economies, ecologies, and social networks, the objective is to design a series of interventions—at a wide range of scales and operations—that can lead to futures for an area in search of dramatic transition. Our aim is not simply to produce a series of plans but to invent new styles for cooperative design and a vision for the region.

Panelists: Lee Bey, Brad Hunt, Roberta Feldman, Phil Enquist, Martin Felsen
Moderated by Michael Sorkin

Monday, January 26, 10:30 p.m.–Tuesday, January 27, 1:00 a.m.
School of the Art Institute Chicago
The LeRoy Neiman Center, Sharp Building
37 S. Wabash Ave., 1st floor
Chicago, IL

More event info