Reproachful ghosts of buildings will be scattered around New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward this fall as part of Prospect. 1, the city’s first biennial contemporary art festival. Along with indoor exhibits at some 20 venues, the fair’s curators have brought in site-specific sculptures representing structures that New Orleans lost in the Katrina flooding, or should have built beforehand to protect lives, or would do well to commission now to commemorate the tragedy.
Wangechi Mutu, a Kenyan-born artist, is assembling light bulbs into a life-sized outline of a gabled cottage
that once stood near the levees. The owner was able to rebuild the foundation after the storm, but then the contractors absconded with her savings. New York–based sculptor Paul Villin-ski has transformed a standard metal-skinned FEMA trailer into “Emergency Response Studio”; he’s added solar panels and a towering wind turbine, and proposes that artists occupy such mobile housing during emergencies to document the scenes and commiserate with victims. Los Angeles–based sculptor Mark Bradford has cobbled scrapwood into a 69-foot-long ark named Mithra (after a pagan deity) for a basketball court near the aptly named Flood Street. And Robin Rhode, a South African artist based in Berlin, turned a ruined cement-block public toilet into “Contemplation Space,” replacing the bathroom fixtures with a fountain. He expects the piece to “touch on subjects such as rebirth, reinvention, vitality, and purity.”
Paul Villinski’s “Emergency Response Studio” (2008), still in progress
Dan Cameron, the director of spaces: “We’ve been amazed at the Prospect. 1, describes the installations cooperation we’ve had from owners as part of “a blast of energy through- of sites they didn’t know what to do out the town.” The sculptors, he adds, with.” Through January 18. had a surprisingly easy time wran- www.prospectneworleans.org gling permission to take over the open —EVE M. KAHN
of African dictators, of corruption, and of the West and the way Africa has been forgotten.” Among the graphics produced by this imaginary figure is a self-portrait in which the naked and quite angry-looking designer squats out a crap over a map of a bleeding Africa set in chains underneath a banner of the “G13” (2036’s version of the group of G8 nations).
When Walker sent his initial pro-
Garth Walker isn’t your typical graph- posal to Delormas, he says, the curator
ics provocateur. A partner in the showed it to the directors “and they
Durban, South Africa, firm Orange expressed some shock at the direction
Juice Design and publisher of i-jusi, an I had taken.” Still, at press time there
antic magazine of that country’s post- were no plans for any omissions. The
apartheid visual culture, he’s got a low finished graphic program, which will
international profile. cover around 3,000 square feet of wall
That, in part, was what prompted space in a vast open room, includes French curator Jérôme Delormas to a remote-control unit (it controls commission an installation from Africa) with buttons that spell WAR him for the Saint-Étienne Biennale, ON TERROR and options for “famine,” opening November 15 and billed as “sanctions,” “obliterate,” and “invade.” Europe’s largest design festival. The On a gravel-covered floor there will brief: Deliver an “African perspective” be tombs—modeled on the earthen on the future of Saint-Étienne, a former graves used to bury African AIDS center of the French munitions indus- victims—for George W. Bush, Nicolas try outside of Lyon, in the year 2036. Sarkozy, and Robert Mugabe.
Walker responded with a proposal Having experienced the ills of sprung from the mind of a fictional apartheid, Walker understands the character named “Jabu Ndlovu,” a po- importance of telling truth to power. litically disillusioned designer based “It’s easier to design when you’ve in Durban who wins a trip to France in got a message than when you’re just 2036 and “has to do all his research on doing something decorative,” he says. his Chinese, solar-powered knock-off Through November 30.
Mac,” Walker explains. “Jabu’s critical www.citedudesign.com —MARK LAMSTER
(Way) Out of Africa A graphic design installation projects a bleak, shocking future.
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