Artist:

Katarina Burin (born Bratislava, Slovakia; lives and works in Cambridge, MA, USA).

Description:

“This exhibition presents a body of work attributed to the Czechoslovakian architect Petra Andrejova-Molnár, an overlooked (in fact, fictional) figure active in Eastern and Central Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. The exhibition presents a diverse range of materials: including architectural models, drawings, furniture and design objects, staged photographs, and biographical texts. In generating Andrejova-Molnár’s work, and the scholarly apparatus around it, American artist Katarina Burin simultaneously inserts her into and subtly destabilizes the established canon of architectural history—lending voice to female designers, while also questioning notions of authorship and authenticity, the relationship between gender and the archive, and the historical tension between national identity and internationalist aspiration. The project both demonstrates how historical movements and utopian ideologies are complicated and contradictory formations in a constant state of flux, while also creating a space of play around the mythos of “the architect.””–Graham Foundation website

Above image: installation at ICA Boston, 2013