Curator:
Hans-Ulrich Obrist (born 1968 in Zurich, Switzerland; lives and works in London, England).

Description:
An exhibition curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist at the Casa Museo Luis Barragán in Mexico City, which ran for three years and included forty-seven artists and contributors by the exhibition’s end.

“When I visited Mexico City for the first time, Pedro Reyes told me a lot about the Casa Barragán, which inspired a first visit in the house of the same name. After a while, the idea of an imaginary exhibition began to take shape and in the course of the following year it crystallized in conversations with the Director of the Barragán house, Catalina Corcuera, and LCM, a visionary urban laboratory who had already organized several very intense research projects in Mexico City. LCM’s openness and inventiveness allowed us to define this exhibition as a Laboratory where the emphasis lies on the process of research and knowledge production.

“Throughout the year 2002 the following artists visited the Museum and made their research in situ.: Anri Sala, Cerith Wyn Evans, Claudia Fernandez, Damian Ortega, Dan Graham, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Dorit Margreiter, Douglas Gordon, Gilbert & George, Iñaki Bonillas, Koo Jeong-a, Lygia Pape, Niele Toroni, Olafur Eliasson, Pedro Reyes, Peter Fischli / Davis Weiss, Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Roni Horn, and Kazuyo Sejima / Ryue Nishizawa SANAA. The Laboratory year at the Barragán House is about how experiments, ideas and concepts work between art and architecture, how bridges can be built where we go beyond the fear of pooling knowledge.”
—Hans-Ulrich Obrist, “the air is blue,” e-flux, October 29, 2002.

“Luis Barragán’s house, Louis Kahn wrote after visiting it, is a place that ‘could have been built a hundred years ago or a hundred years from now.’ So, in more ways than one, is The Air is Blue, an exhibition orchestrated in the master’s house and studio by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Pedro Reyes, over the course of three years. The ever-growing list of participants comprised at the end forty-seven artists and contributors, including Francis Alÿs, Daniel Buren, Gilbert & George, Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, Joseph Grigely, Rem Koolhaas, Lygia Pape, Anri Sala, Ettore Sottsass, Rikrit Tiravanija, and Niele Toroni. Their interventions collided visions and conversations about poetry, urbanism, music, sexuality, art, and architecture.”
—”The Air is Blue,” Mousse Publishing.