Michael Rakowitz will discuss recent and past projects, including The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, the artist’s ongoing attempt to reconstruct the archeological artifacts looted from the National Museum of Iraq in April 2003. Rakowitz will unpack the common processes of his various works while plotting its components.
Michael Rakowitz (b. 1973, New York) is an artist based in Chicago and New York CIty. In 1998 he initiated paraSITE (pictured above), an ongoing project in which the artist custom builds inflatable shelters for homeless people that attach to the exterior outtake vents of a building’s heating, ventilation, or air conditioning system. His work has appeared in venues worldwide including P.S.1, MoMA, MassMOCA, Castello di Rivoli, the 16th Biennale of Sydney, the 10th Istanbul Biennial, Sharjah Biennial 8, Tirana Biennale, National Design Triennial at the Cooper-Hewitt, and Transmediale 05. He has had solo exhibitions at Lombard-Freid Projects in New York, Alberto Peola Arte Contemporanea in Torino, and Stadtturmgalerie/ Kunstraum Innsbruck. His public project, “Return,” was presented by Creative Time in New York in 2006. He is the recipient of a 2008 Creative Capital Grant; a Sharjah Biennial Jury Award; a 2006 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Grant in Architecture and Environmental Structures; the 2003 Dena Foundation Award, and the 2002 Design 21 Grand Prix from UNESCO. His solo exhibition, “The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one’s own” was on view at Tate Modern in London in 2010. His recent project, The Breakup, was presented by Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem in October, and he is currently working on a new commission to premiere at SALT in Istanbul in November 2011. Rakowitz is an Associate Professor in Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.
