Another Reality. After Lina Bo Bardi

Date: 6 April - 3 July 2016
In progress: 6 - 22 April
Location: Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
Open: Wednesday thru Sunday, 12-17 hrs
Download exhibition guide (pdf)
Admission: free
Part of Attempts to Read the World (Differently)

"I saw the world around me as just immediate reality rather than an abstract literary exercise".
- Lina Bo Bardi

Six artists share their vision on the Brazilian architect and designer Lina Bo Bardi:
Céline Condorelli, Leonor Antunes, Manuel Raeder & Mariana Castillo Deball, Mike Cooter and Wendelien van Oldenborgh

Stroom School - Another Reality
The exhibition Another Reality. After Lina Bo Bardi is accompanied by a public program of lectures and tours and other events.
 
PROGRAM
All events take place at Stroom Den Haag, Hogewal 1-9, The Hague, unless noted otherwise.

Thursday 28 April 2016, 15-17 hrs
Lecture Anna van Lingen and Denisa Kollárová
In collaboration with the Community of Practice (a study group consisting of architects, artists, art historians and eductors) Stroom organizes a meeting dedicated the social function of public space. With a lecture by Anna van Lingen and Denisa Kollarová about their publication Aldo van Eyck - Seventeen Playgrounds. Followed by a discussion and short guided tour of the exhibition.

Wednesday 11 May 2016, 20 hrs
Lectures Zeuler Lima and Max Risselada
Zeuler Lima (the biographer of Lina Bo Bardi) will speak about Lina Bo Bardi as an exhibition designer and Max Risselada will tell more about Charles and Ray Eames and Lina Bo Bardi.

27 May - 29 May 2016, 11-18 hrs
Festival Designkwartier
During Festival Designkwartier students of the department of Interior Design at the Royal Academy of Art The Hague (KABK) present the chairs they made ‘after' the chairs of Lina Bo Bardi.

Friday 10 June 2016, 14-17 uur
Times of complexity and bewildement: Design no impasse
Zeuler Lima (Washington University, St. Louis) talks with artists, architects, designers and writers about the impasses they encounter when trying to give meaning to design in the improvement of everyday life. With a.o. Saskia van Stein (director Bureau Europa), Nina Paim (graphic designer, Basel, Switzerland), Pedro Rivera (Studio X Rio de Janeiro), Mariana Lanari (artist, São Paulo/Amsterdam).

Wednesday 15 June 2016, 14-17 hrs
The Historical Present
Paul Meurs (TU Delft) talks about Lina Bo Bardi's ideas that it is ' necessary to consider the past as a historical present, still alive.' He uses Bo Bardi's work in Salvador to talk about the role of culture, history and identity in transforming a city.

Tuesday 21 June 2016, 14.00-17.00 hrs
The Theory of Architectural Practice + Launch Volume
This event has been cancelled!

Saturday 2 July 2016, 12-17 hrs
Lina Bo Bardi Fan Day in collaboration with Wendelien van Oldenborgh
Lina Bo Bardi loved to talk with people. Her Sunday brunches were known to result in lively conversations around the fireplace in her Casa de Vidro. Let us turn Stroom into Lina Bo Bardi's livingroom on Saturday 2 July. An afternoon to talk to interesting people and to watch great films on Bo Bardi. And there will be the launch of a special publication, a performance everyone can participate in; food and drinks will be served and there will be nice Brazilian music. With: Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Marcelo Rezende, Mike Cooter, Finn Beames, Mark Pimlott, Max Risselada, Laura Smith, Krijn Christaansen, Jorn Konijn.

About Another Reality
This spring the program of Stroom Den Haag focuses on the architect Lina Bo Bardi (Rome 1914 - São Paolo 1992). Stroom invited six artists who are inspired by her ideas and practice, in which people always take center stage. The artists create work ‘after' Lina Bo Bardi: they quote and use her work, share it in spirit, idea, shape and form and give it a renewed urgency.

Lina Bo Bardi is best known for a number of striking buildings in Brazil, like Museu de Arte de São Paolo (MASP), SESC Fábrica da Pompéia and Casa de Vidro. In her architecture designs she was not primarily interested in form, but more in the way her buildings were used. She saw people as the leading players in a space, bringing her ideas to life. But Bo Bardi designed so much more, from exhibitions, chairs and magazines to stage sets, jewellery and sandwiches. She wrote about architecture, initiated a number of magazines on architecture which she also designed, she worked as a teacher and she designed two churches, various houses and two theaters. She was a museum director in Salvador in the Northeast of Brazil, where she also worked on a series of renovations and developed a strong belief in the everyday creativity of ‘ordinary' Brazilians. She was politically and socially engaged, she dedicated herself to making the ‘poor' culture of the Brazilian Northeast visible, and she actively propagated her belief in the social responsibility of the architect.
institutobardi.com.br

The only time a survey of Bo Bardi's work was on view in The Netherlands was in 1995 at the TU Delft, a presentation initiated by the architect Aldo van Eyck. Van Eyck praised Bo Bardi's "uncompromising - simultaneous - solidarity with people, art and architecture", and the manner in which she staged the way people could use and occupy her buildings, creating a different interaction. In honour of her 100th birthday there were a number of international exhibitions in 2014 and 2015, mostly focusing on her architectural practice.

The exhibition at Stroom does not focus on the buildings Bo Bardi made, but rather on the way she achieved these results. We present the ideas behind her buildings, texts, exhibitions and productions. We do this not only by showing her own work, but also by inviting artists who approach her work in an interesting and innovative way.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh shows Lina Bo Bardi: The Didactic Room, a work commissioned by the Van Abbemuseum in 2010, inspired by Bo Bardi's crystal easels, a revolutionary exhibition design for the MASP. At Stroom the crystal easels of Van Oldenborgh will be shown with collages of Bo Bardi's work made by her and Grant Watson, and with artworks on loan from private collectors (mostly from The Hague).
www.wilfriedlentz.com

Céline Condorelli presents a new work after an exhibition design by Bo Bardi from 1970: a wooden grid structure carrying plants that are inextricably linked to the colonial, social and economic development of Brazil: sugar, cotton, rubber, coffee, cocoa and tobacco. On this structure (reproductions of) drawings by Bo Bardi will be shown on a weekly basis.
celinecondorelli.eu

Leonor Antunes shows one of her Lina sculptures, made of brass wire and brass tubes. The piece comprises a 1:1 reproduction of the parquet floor that Bo Bardi used for the back part of Casa de Vidro, the house Bo Bardi built for herself. What is two-dimensional in the house, in Antunes' work get the three-dimensionality of a sculpture.
airdeparis.com/artists/leonor-antunes

Mike Cooter contributes a concrete ‘stage' to the exhibition; a reflection of the cloud-shaped, anthropomorphic window holes Bo Bardi introduced. Cooter sees his 'stage' as a monument to her attention for the social and her organic interventions in rigid systems.
mikecooter.org

Mariana Castillo Deball and Manuel Raeder are inspired by the drawings Bo Bardi's made for her buildings. The colourful and playful sketches are in sharp contrast to conventional architectural drawings with their mathematical precision and architectural details. They contain an atmosphere, trees, plants, animals and insects, and instructions for different functions. Deball and Raeder designed a number of animal-shaped seating sculptures, built in paper mache by a local artist. They are a statement for craftsmanship versus mass production.
manuelraeder.co.uk

Next to these works and the drawings of Bo Bardi we also present photos and films, books and documentation and offer an in-depth Stroom School program of guided tours, lectures and talks. During the run of the exhibition there also will be various public seminars.

'In Progress' events
Between 6 and 22 April 2016 the exhibition Display Show gradually transformed into Another Reality. After Lina Bo Bardi. With lectures, talks and performances.

Acknowledgements:
Another Reality. After Lina Bo Bardiis made possible with the financial support of Creative Industries Fund NL, the Mondriaan Fund and The City of The Hague.
Special thanks to: Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi, Museu de Arte São Paolo, Architekturmuseum/Pinakothek der Moderne, Munchen, Air de Paris en Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.
And with the help of and through talks with: Marcelo Ferraz, Isa Grinspum Ferraz, Jorn Konijn, Pablo Lafuente, Giancarlo Lattoraca, Paul Meurs, Luiza Proença, Marcelo Rezende, Max Risselada, Felix Toro, Rieke Vos, Andres Lepik, Simone Bader, Zeuler Lima, Renato Anelli, Ligia Nobre, and the Community of Practice team (Wieger Ambagts, Kaj van Boheemen, Josje Hattink, Jana Mol, Charlotte Thomas, Lesley Wijnands, Rory van Wingerden, supervised by Margriet Brouwers of Showroom MAMA).