Families and children ages 4-10 are welcome to join the MAK Center in a sensing exercise inside and outside the remarkable domestic space of Schindler’s architecture. Eschewing formal readings of building form, the activity encourages haptic, aural and olfactory experiences of modernist architecture, its ecology, and its surroundings. The program invites families to engage in the environment and explore new modes of sensing together.

REGISTER HERE

Choreographer Alexsa Durrans presents a dance workshop that inspects the conditioning our bodies undergo when institutions ask us to carry complex systems of knowledge making and labor practice. How can we acknowledge and interrogate these tangled systems through the rigorous work of movement: gesture, posture and rhythm?

In this workshop, participants rest, talk, engage and move together, using each other as guiding posts and learning modules. The class explores movement in the body that quirks, glitches and side-tracks from embodied, or inscribed actions — a deviation from what is assumed for our bodies to do and participate in. 

The workshop is free and open level. No prior movement experience is required. We encourage a space for all folx to come and center their own practices while engaging with and encouraging the work and labor others bring into the space.

REGISTER HERE

ALEXSA DURRANS

Alexsa Durrans is choreographer and video artist. She received her BA from UCLA in World Arts and Cultures/Dance and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in Choreography with a concentration in Integrated Media. Alexsa creates site specific movement landscapes and sculptural video installations. Her practice researches knowledge sharing systems by coaxing movement to topple over written and verbal language in order to look at slippages in both forms. Alexsa believes that working with the body is to resist docility and to imagine new ways of filling time and space. 

Who plans the parties for the party planners? Hosted in collaboration with QNA, this house party invites past and present queer party organizers in Los Angeles to be “archived” throughout the night by photography, videography, music, and dance.

Past queer parties have often lacked documentation and archival materials due to budget and/or an anti-survellence effort to maintain safety in privacy and anonymity. Similar efforts position the private space of a “home” or “house” as a safe and private space for the LGBTQ+ community to express love and party— increasingly now in the wake of recent gun violence and domestic terrorism in gay and queer nightclubs and bars, Pulse (2016) and recently Club Q (2022).

While the camera is often focused on the party-goer, this event reorients the gaze back to the work of queer organizing. Archiving: Queer House Party seeds the beginnings of a valuable archive of all of the queer organizers and parties in Los Angeles that have happened past and present.  

R.M. Schindler’s domestic architecture opens as a space to host, document, and archive this rare and valuable moment of queer organizers in Los Angeles coming together — situating the MAK Center as a repository of a special archive for future use.

QNA L.A.

QNA (Louie Bofill, Jae-an Crisman, Paulie Morales, Ly Tran, and Howin Wong) is a Los Angeles-based collective and platform that highlights queer and trans API artists and culture through art, nightlife, and community.

This program is postponed due to COVID-19. Please stay tuned for more information coming by subscribing to our mailing list or following us on socials.

ELKE KRASNY

Elke Krasny, PhD, Professor for Art and Education and Head of the Department of Education in the Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Krasny’s scholarship, academic writings, curatorial work, and international lectures address questions of care at the present historical conjuncture with a focus on emancipatory and transformative practices in art, curating, architecture and urbanism. The 2019 exhibition and edited volume Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, curated and edited together with Angelika Fitz, was published by MIT Press and introduces a care perspective in architecture addressing the anthropocenic conditions of the global present. Her 2020 essay ‘In-Sorge-Bleiben. Care-Feminismus für einen infizierten Planeten‘ develops a care-ethical perspective for pandemic times and was published by transcript in Michael Volkmer’s and Karin Werner’s volume Die Corona-Gesellschaft.

Barcelona-based architect studio, TAKK and participants of the 3-day building workshop host a brunch discussing interspecies architecture. After sharing insights, challenges and outcomes of Assembling: Props for Learning, the duo will engage in dialogue with Reorientations curator Rosario Talevi addressing issues around the ecologies and design of living spaces for a wide range of users - human and non-human- and its implications within the current climate emergency and ecological breakdown.

TAKK

TAKK is a space for architectural production focused on the development of material practices in the intersection of nature, culture, technology and politics, with particular attention to the challenges raised by the age of Anthropocene. TAKK’s architectural experiments are test sites for exploring critical architecture that aims at building more open societies. While TAKK’s choices of materials and forms can seem at odds with the idea of an ecologically aware practice, the studio sources from regional supply chains and off-the-shelf supplies as a means of localizing and customizing. Much of their design work is also invested in a disassembly process after the facts of use, in which the afterlife of objects and materials are considered with the same intention and scrutiny as their assembly. Finally, working in the specter of modernism, the use of colors and ornament become overtly political gestures for TAKK.

ROSARIO TALEVI

Rosario Talevi is a Berlin-based architect, curator, editor and educator interested in critical spatial practice (Rendell), transformative pedagogies and feminist futures. Her work advances architecture as a form of agency – in its transformative sense and in its capacity for acting otherwise (Schneider) and as a form of care – one that provides the political stakes to repair our broken world (Tronto). Rosario is a founding member of Soft Agency, a diasporic group of female architects, artists, curators, scholars and writers working with spatial practices and Floating e.V., the non-for-profit association organising, programming and maintaining Floating University in Berlin. She was Guest Professor of Social Design (2021-22) at the Hochschule für bildende Künste (HFBK) in Hamburg. Currently, she is a fellow at the Thomas Mann Haus in Los Angeles, California.

Reorientations turns the Thomas Mann House kitchen into a site of dialogue, hospitality and reciprocity for a communal dinner. In this collaborative event, MAK Center Director Jia Yi Gu and 2022 Thomas Mann Fellow Rosario Talevi will convene a discursive dinner in the kitchen of the Thomas Mann House. Guests are invited to speak on their work and propositions for the upcoming program. This informal dining situation aims to position a shared tone and a common ground for the days to come and following Reorientations programming. 

With fellows and residents from the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Thomas Mann House, and guests Alexsa Durrans, Joel Garcia, Julia Tcharfas, TAKK and QNA.

THOMAS MANN HOUSE

The Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles aims to create a vibrant transatlantic space for debate, where outstanding personalities, in dialogue with each other and the host country, address fundamental contemporary and future issues related to politics, society, and culture.

The Thomas Mann House is a residency center owned by the Federal Republic of Germany. The Thomas Mann Fellowships enable academics, pioneering thinkers, and intellectuals who live, or have lived, in Germany to tackle the pressing challenges of our time and to foster the intellectual and cultural exchange between Germany and the United States. 

Assembling: Props for Learning is a 3-day hands-on building workshop where participants are invited to work side by side with Barcelona-based architecture studio TAKK. The workshop assembles a series of props specially conceived to accommodate activities for the first iteration of Subject Studies: Reorientations. Participants engage in a convivial and communal atmosphere within the exceptional domestic space designed by R.M. Schindler while assembling milled formwork, foam sheeting, chicken mesh, and wax paraffin into new furniture: the Isolation Daybed, the Reading Corner, the Biodiversity Lamp, and several Wax Stools. Dining, digesting, and discoursing run in parallel to the activities of assembling and building, with morning and afternoon collective meals and communal care provisions. 

Part building-workshop, part pilot program, Assembling: Props for Learning proposes architectural assemblies that encourage new formats for exchange and co-inhabitation. Participants are invited to come ready to experiment with a new ethos for architectural production with the design duo — exploring new technologies, materials, assembly systems, hardware, and off-the-shelf items. Contributors explore TAKK’s architectural attitude through embracing effusive materials, supply chain technologies, otherworldly shapes, textures as ornament, and saturated colors. Participants will be building: an Isolation Daybed, Reading Corner, Biodiversity Lamp, and several Wax Stools, and are invited to use the props during the run of public programs for Subject Studies: Reorientations.

ABOUT TAKK

TAKK is a space for architectural production focused on the development of material practices in the intersection of nature, culture, technology and politics, with particular attention to the challenges raised by the age of Anthropocene. TAKK’s architectural experiments are test sites for exploring critical architecture that aims at building more open societies. While TAKK’s choices of materials and forms can seem at odds with the idea of an ecologically aware practice, the studio sources from regional supply chains and off-the-shelf supplies as a means of localizing and customizing. Much of their design work is also invested in a disassembly process after the facts of use, in which the afterlife of objects and materials are considered with the same intention and scrutiny as their assembly. Finally, working in the specter of modernism, the use of colors and ornament become overtly political gestures for TAKK.

The locations for programs vary and will be disclosed upon RSVP.

Assembling: Props for Learning is a 3-day hands-on building workshop where participants are invited to work side by side with Barcelona-based architecture studio TAKK. The workshop assembles a series of props specially conceived to accommodate activities for the first iteration of Subject Studies: Reorientations. Participants engage in a convivial and communal atmosphere within the exceptional domestic space designed by R.M. Schindler while assembling milled formwork, foam sheeting, chicken mesh, and wax paraffin into new furniture: the Isolation Daybed, the Reading Corner, the Biodiversity Lamp, and several Wax Stools. Dining, digesting, and discoursing run in parallel to the activities of assembling and building, with morning and afternoon collective meals and communal care provisions. 

Part building-workshop, part pilot program, Assembling: Props for Learning proposes architectural assemblies that encourage new formats for exchange and co-inhabitation. Participants are invited to come ready to experiment with a new ethos for architectural production with the design duo — exploring new technologies, materials, assembly systems, hardware, and off-the-shelf items. Contributors explore TAKK’s architectural attitude through embracing effusive materials, supply chain technologies, otherworldly shapes, textures as ornament, and saturated colors. Participants will be building: an Isolation Daybed, Reading Corner, Biodiversity Lamp, and several Wax Stools, and are invited to use the props during the run of public programs for Subject Studies: Reorientations.

ABOUT TAKK

TAKK is a space for architectural production focused on the development of material practices in the intersection of nature, culture, technology and politics, with particular attention to the challenges raised by the age of Anthropocene. TAKK’s architectural experiments are test sites for exploring critical architecture that aims at building more open societies. While TAKK’s choices of materials and forms can seem at odds with the idea of an ecologically aware practice, the studio sources from regional supply chains and off-the-shelf supplies as a means of localizing and customizing. Much of their design work is also invested in a disassembly process after the facts of use, in which the afterlife of objects and materials are considered with the same intention and scrutiny as their assembly. Finally, working in the specter of modernism, the use of colors and ornament become overtly political gestures for TAKK.

The locations for programs vary and will be disclosed upon RSVP.

Assembling: Props for Learning is a 3-day hands-on building workshop where participants are invited to work side by side with Barcelona-based architecture studio TAKK. The workshop assembles a series of props specially conceived to accommodate activities for the first iteration of Subject Studies: Reorientations. Participants engage in a convivial and communal atmosphere within the exceptional domestic space designed by R.M. Schindler while assembling milled formwork, foam sheeting, chicken mesh, and wax paraffin into new furniture: the Isolation Daybed, the Reading Corner, the Biodiversity Lamp, and several Wax Stools. Dining, digesting, and discoursing run in parallel to the activities of assembling and building, with morning and afternoon collective meals and communal care provisions. 

Part building-workshop, part pilot program, Assembling: Props for Learning proposes architectural assemblies that encourage new formats for exchange and co-inhabitation. Participants are invited to come ready to experiment with a new ethos for architectural production with the design duo — exploring new technologies, materials, assembly systems, hardware, and off-the-shelf items. Contributors explore TAKK’s architectural attitude through embracing effusive materials, supply chain technologies, otherworldly shapes, textures as ornament, and saturated colors. Participants will be building: an Isolation Daybed, Reading Corner, Biodiversity Lamp, and several Wax Stools, and are invited to use the props during the run of public programs for Subject Studies: Reorientations.

ABOUT TAKK

TAKK is a space for architectural production focused on the development of material practices in the intersection of nature, culture, technology and politics, with particular attention to the challenges raised by the age of Anthropocene. TAKK’s architectural experiments are test sites for exploring critical architecture that aims at building more open societies. While TAKK’s choices of materials and forms can seem at odds with the idea of an ecologically aware practice, the studio sources from regional supply chains and off-the-shelf supplies as a means of localizing and customizing. Much of their design work is also invested in a disassembly process after the facts of use, in which the afterlife of objects and materials are considered with the same intention and scrutiny as their assembly. Finally, working in the specter of modernism, the use of colors and ornament become overtly political gestures for TAKK.

The locations for programs vary and will be disclosed upon RSVP.

The MAK Center is pleased to present the twentieth iteration of Vienna — Los Angeles Garage Exchange: Maruša Sagadin & Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork. Vienna-based artist Maruša Sagadin collaborates with Los Angeles artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork. The artists respond to each other’s work to develop an exhibition for the Mackey Apartments’ Garage Top Gallery.

This is a free public event. No RSVP required.

The past seven years have seen a rush of art exhibitions about artificial intelligence and machine learning. These shows have parsed both cultural fantasies and cold hard facts of AI in its current forms. These shows’ curatorial frames are at times fiercely critical and at other times fawning. In X-TRA 24.1, Editor Anuradha Vikram focuses on one such blockbuster exhibition, Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI at the De Young. In their essay, “Uncanny Views: Reflections on the Human in the Age of AI,” Vikram probes the show’s position, established through artworks both skeptical of and in thrall to algorithmic control. Vikram puts forth an argument that institutions must better grapple with their framings of the human.

On October 28, Vikram joins Mashinka Firunts Hakopian in conversation at the MAK Center’s Mackey Apartments. Hakopian is a professor, writer, and scholar versed in critical imaginaries of technology and AI. Vikram and Hakopian explore how museum exhibitions subtly reinforce established orders and the norms embedded in quantitative systems. As we learn to live with a menagerie of uncanny beings—non-human intelligences, eerie avatars and bots, figurations just at the edge of understanding—how might we understand the influence of the art that takes them up as subject, as collaborator? What models of the human—as unknowable or knowable, as quantifiable or illegible—are encoded into AI artworks? What and who are designed as abject? What institutional critiques of technological policing, mass surveillance, predictive algorithms, and data extraction could be radical?

Nora N. Khan, Executive Director of Project X Foundation for Art and Criticism, publisher of X-TRA, will moderate Uncanny Intelligences. The discussion closes X-TRA’s programming around volume 24, issue 1, following a sold-out screening and conversation with Theo Anthony around his film All Light, Everywhere, and the issue’s July launch at LAXART. Please join us and continue to support independent publishing of sharp, experimental criticism.

Anuradha Vikram

Anuradha Vikram (born 1976, New York, NY; lives in Los Angeles) is a writer, curator, and educator. Vikram’s book Decolonizing Culture (Sming Sming Books, 2017) helped initiate a global movement to decolonize arts institutions and monuments. They have written for art periodicals and publications from Paper Monument, Heyday Press, Routledge, and Oxford University Press. They are an Editorial Board member at X-TRA and an editor at X Artists’ Books.

Vikram is faculty in the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. They hold an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and a BS in Studio Art from NYU.

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an Armenian-born writer, artist, and researcher residing in Glendale, CA. She is an Associate Professor of Technology and Social Justice at ArtCenter College of Design. In 2021, she was a Mellon Professor of the Practice at Occidental College, where she co-curated the Oxy Arts exhibition "Encoding Futures: Critical Imaginaries of AI" with Meldia Yesayan. Her book, The Institute for Other Intelligences, is forthcoming from X Artists’ Books.

MODERATOR

Nora N. Khan is a curator, editor, and writer of criticism on digital visual culture, the politics of software, and philosophy of emerging technology. She is the Executive Director of Project X for Art and Criticism, publishing X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal in Los Angeles. She is also the Curator for the next Biennale de L’Image en Mouvement in 2023, with Andrea Bellini, hosted by Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève. Khan’s short books are Seeing, Naming, Knowing (Brooklyn Rail), on the logic of machine vision, and Fear Indexing the X-Files (Primary Information), co-written with Steven Warwick. Forthcoming are No Context: AI Art, Machine Learning, and the Stakes for Art Criticism (Lund Humphries), The Artificial and the Real (Art Metropole), and a hybrid memoir about criticism from Strange Attractor Press.

ABOUT X-TRA

X-TRA’s mission is to sustain a vibrant critical discourse about contemporary art and foster inclusive networks and expansive thinking. X-TRA’s journal, website, and public events create forums for the diverse voices of artists and writers. X-TRA cultivates a deep understanding of contemporary art, explores a wide range of ideas and artists’ work, and strives to do so with generosity and integrity.

Join the curators of Schindler House 100 on in-person tours of the Schindler House highlighting their unique individual perspectives on the exhibition.

JIA YI GU

Jia Yi Gu is director of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture and co-director of Spinagu. She is an architectural historian, educator, exhibition-maker and organizer. Her work focuses on histories of knowledge production and display practices in architecture, with an emphasis on objects, exhibitions, and document history. 

What does it mean to eat a poem? Through poetry writing and eating, sugar papers and palettes, Vienna-based artists Yela An, Ting-Jung Chen and Miae Son ask how writers “transform feelings into words” and subsequently into confectionery. This performance invites Los Angeles poets alongside workshop participants, including literary and performance academics, to contribute texts centering on traditional poetic forms and structures found throughout Asia. Each of the poems will be inscribed with the four seasons, a critical element in poetry genres from Asia, and transposed into writing. Artist-produced sugar boards and ink serve as props to the literary workshop and performance, which will subsequently be consumed as an act of nourishment and pleasure-practice.

1:1:2 unfolds in three parts over three nights, featuring one poet/artist per night: through writing, reading, and digesting. This oratory and oral activity enacted within the Schindler House transforms the modernist house with Japanese associations into a staging ground for an exploration on the history of sweetness, consumption, and migration that spans continents.

YELA AN (ARTIST)

Yela An (b. 1987 in Seoul, Republic of Korea) has been creating artwork concerning the mass media’s former images of women and how they reflect the current state of gender (in)equality. Her interest lies in analyzing the present representation of Asian women within Asia as they fulfill an external stereotype supported by the occidental gaze. She is the recipient of the Artstart scholarship from Academy of Fine Art Vienna, the 2nd prize of the young photographers from Photon Centre for Contemporary Photography in Ljubljana, amongst many others. She partook in artist residency programs at Thealit Frauen.Kultur.Labor in Bremen, Germany, as well as at Kunstraum St. Virgil in Salzburg, Austria. Her works are selected for the permanent collection in Kupferstichkabinnet, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, as well as in the Ministry of the Arts Culture, the Civil Service and Sport in Austria.

TING-JUNG CHEN (ARTIST)

Ting-Jung Chen’s (b. 1985 in Taipei, Taiwan) art praxis, which relates to historiography and cultural political semiotics, focuses on collective memories, appropriation, and processes of empowerment. By reproducing artifacts of the culture industry, representations of ideology, and their relationship to human beings, the artist explores transformations of identity and draws the overlapping culture mingling into a spatial atlas. She is the recipient of the DAAD Artist Program 2023, MAK-Schindlers-Scholarship 2019, and the Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2018. Her works have been shown in various venues internationally, including Belvedere 21erHaus, Vienna; Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna); Kunsthaus Hamburg; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; Digital Arts Center, Taipei; 18 Street Art Center, Santa Monica, USA among many others. She is presenting her solo exhibition at the Taipei Fine Art Museum in August.

MIAE SON (ARTIST)

Miae Son (b. Seoul, South Korea) is based in Vienna. Since 2009 she has lived in Germany and Austria focusing on performative video and installation. The artist extracts precise moments of her everyday life as a migrant in Europe, which reflects the complexity of structural issues, that the artist deals with in her work. She studied sculpture in Seoul and Video installation in Bremen and Vienna. She has been awarded numerous grants and prizes, including START-Scholarship of the Federal Ministry for Culture(AT), Short Film Award of the FrauenFilmTage, ArtStart_Studio Scholarship. Her work has recently been presented in group, solo exhibition and at film festivals, such as Bildraum01, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Charim Gallery, Diagonale Graz, Kassel DokFest, Kunsthalle Bremen.

LEONA CHEN (POET)

Leona Chen is the author of Book of Cord, her debut poetry collection exploring the loss of Taiwanese identity through colonization and emigration. Her poems explore histories both recognized and erased, becoming her own protest, journey of self-discovery, and rallying cry for the Taiwanese American community. She is the firstborn of parents raised under martial law in Taiwan, and the great-granddaughter of the aboriginal Ketagalan tribe’s last standing chief.

MEILING CHENG (POET)

Meiling Cheng (b. 1960 in Taipei, Taiwan) is an award-winning poet and essayist, having published numerous poems, short stories, personal essays, and art criticism articles in English and Chinese. The nexus of Dr. Cheng’s research is interdisciplinary performance and live art studies, an area of expertise she cultivated by integrating a strong visual art orientation to her doctoral training in contemporary and avant-garde theatres. She is professor of dramatic arts in theatre critical studies in the USC School of Dramatic Arts and is the author of In Other Los Angelesses: Multicentric Performance Art and Beijing Xingwei: Contemporary Performance: Theatricality Across Genres. She has curated, directed, and performed in live art events in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Tainan.

JESSICA KIM (POET)

Jessica Kim (she/her) is a Korean-American high school junior and poet who has lived in Korea, Singapore, and currently lives in Los Angeles, CA. She identifies as visually-impaired and advocates for the disabled community. Recently, she has been named the 2021-22 Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate and runner-up for the 2022 United States National Youth Poet Laureate. She is the author of L(EYE)GHT, runner-up for the Animal Heart Press’ Chapbook Contest, which has been published in April 2022. 

What does it mean to eat a poem? Through poetry writing and eating, sugar papers and palettes, Vienna-based artists Yela An, Ting-Jung Chen and Miae Son ask how writers “transform feelings into words” and subsequently into confectionery. This performance invites Los Angeles poets alongside workshop participants, including literary and performance academics, to contribute texts centering on traditional poetic forms and structures found throughout Asia. Each of the poems will be inscribed with the four seasons, a critical element in poetry genres from Asia, and transposed into writing. Artist-produced sugar boards and ink serve as props to the literary workshop and performance, which will subsequently be consumed as an act of nourishment and pleasure-practice.

1:1:2 unfolds in three parts over three nights, featuring one poet/artist per night: through writing, reading, and digesting. This oratory and oral activity enacted within the Schindler House transforms the modernist house with Japanese associations into a staging ground for an exploration on the history of sweetness, consumption, and migration that spans continents.

YELA AN (ARTIST)

Yela An (b. 1987 in Seoul, Republic of Korea) has been creating artwork concerning the mass media’s former images of women and how they reflect the current state of gender (in)equality. Her interest lies in analyzing the present representation of Asian women within Asia as they fulfill an external stereotype supported by the occidental gaze. She is the recipient of the Artstart scholarship from Academy of Fine Art Vienna, the 2nd prize of the young photographers from Photon Centre for Contemporary Photography in Ljubljana, amongst many others. She partook in artist residency programs at Thealit Frauen.Kultur.Labor in Bremen, Germany, as well as at Kunstraum St. Virgil in Salzburg, Austria. Her works are selected for the permanent collection in Kupferstichkabinnet, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, as well as in the Ministry of the Arts Culture, the Civil Service and Sport in Austria.

TING-JUNG CHEN (ARTIST)

Ting-Jung Chen’s (b. 1985 in Taipei, Taiwan) art praxis, which relates to historiography and cultural political semiotics, focuses on collective memories, appropriation, and processes of empowerment. By reproducing artifacts of the culture industry, representations of ideology, and their relationship to human beings, the artist explores transformations of identity and draws the overlapping culture mingling into a spatial atlas. She is the recipient of the DAAD Artist Program 2023, MAK-Schindlers-Scholarship 2019, and the Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2018. Her works have been shown in various venues internationally, including Belvedere 21erHaus, Vienna; Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna); Kunsthaus Hamburg; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; Digital Arts Center, Taipei; 18 Street Art Center, Santa Monica, USA among many others. She is presenting her solo exhibition at the Taipei Fine Art Museum in August.

MIAE SON (ARTIST)

Miae Son (b. Seoul, South Korea) is based in Vienna. Since 2009 she has lived in Germany and Austria focusing on performative video and installation. The artist extracts precise moments of her everyday life as a migrant in Europe, which reflects the complexity of structural issues, that the artist deals with in her work. She studied sculpture in Seoul and Video installation in Bremen and Vienna. She has been awarded numerous grants and prizes, including START-Scholarship of the Federal Ministry for Culture(AT), Short Film Award of the FrauenFilmTage, ArtStart_Studio Scholarship. Her work has recently been presented in group, solo exhibition and at film festivals, such as Bildraum01, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Charim Gallery, Diagonale Graz, Kassel DokFest, Kunsthalle Bremen.

LEONA CHEN (POET)

Leona Chen is the author of Book of Cord, her debut poetry collection exploring the loss of Taiwanese identity through colonization and emigration. Her poems explore histories both recognized and erased, becoming her own protest, journey of self-discovery, and rallying cry for the Taiwanese American community. She is the firstborn of parents raised under martial law in Taiwan, and the great-granddaughter of the aboriginal Ketagalan tribe’s last standing chief.

MEILING CHENG (POET)

Meiling Cheng (b. 1960 in Taipei, Taiwan) is an award-winning poet and essayist, having published numerous poems, short stories, personal essays, and art criticism articles in English and Chinese. The nexus of Dr. Cheng’s research is interdisciplinary performance and live art studies, an area of expertise she cultivated by integrating a strong visual art orientation to her doctoral training in contemporary and avant-garde theatres. She is professor of dramatic arts in theatre critical studies in the USC School of Dramatic Arts and is the author of In Other Los Angelesses: Multicentric Performance Art and Beijing Xingwei: Contemporary Performance: Theatricality Across Genres. She has curated, directed, and performed in live art events in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Tainan.

JESSICA KIM (POET)

Jessica Kim (she/her) is a Korean-American high school junior and poet who has lived in Korea, Singapore, and currently lives in Los Angeles, CA. She identifies as visually-impaired and advocates for the disabled community. Recently, she has been named the 2021-22 Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate and runner-up for the 2022 United States National Youth Poet Laureate. She is the author of L(EYE)GHT, runner-up for the Animal Heart Press’ Chapbook Contest, which has been published in April 2022. 

What does it mean to eat a poem? Through poetry writing and eating, sugar papers and palettes, Vienna-based artists Yela An, Ting-Jung Chen and Miae Son ask how writers “transform feelings into words” and subsequently into confectionery. This performance invites Los Angeles poets alongside workshop participants, including literary and performance academics, to contribute texts centering on traditional poetic forms and structures found throughout Asia. Each of the poems will be inscribed with the four seasons, a critical element in poetry genres from Asia, and transposed into writing. Artist-produced sugar boards and ink serve as props to the literary workshop and performance, which will subsequently be consumed as an act of nourishment and pleasure-practice.

1:1:2 unfolds in three parts over three nights, featuring one poet/artist per night: through writing, reading, and digesting. This oratory and oral activity enacted within the Schindler House transforms the modernist house with Japanese associations into a staging ground for an exploration on the history of sweetness, consumption, and migration that spans continents.

YELA AN (ARTIST)

Yela An (b. 1987 in Seoul, Republic of Korea) has been creating artwork concerning the mass media’s former images of women and how they reflect the current state of gender (in)equality. Her interest lies in analyzing the present representation of Asian women within Asia as they fulfill an external stereotype supported by the occidental gaze. She is the recipient of the Artstart scholarship from Academy of Fine Art Vienna, the 2nd prize of the young photographers from Photon Centre for Contemporary Photography in Ljubljana, amongst many others. She partook in artist residency programs at Thealit Frauen.Kultur.Labor in Bremen, Germany, as well as at Kunstraum St. Virgil in Salzburg, Austria. Her works are selected for the permanent collection in Kupferstichkabinnet, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, as well as in the Ministry of the Arts Culture, the Civil Service and Sport in Austria.

TING-JUNG CHEN (ARTIST)

Ting-Jung Chen’s (b. 1985 in Taipei, Taiwan) art praxis, which relates to historiography and cultural political semiotics, focuses on collective memories, appropriation, and processes of empowerment. By reproducing artifacts of the culture industry, representations of ideology, and their relationship to human beings, the artist explores transformations of identity and draws the overlapping culture mingling into a spatial atlas. She is the recipient of the DAAD Artist Program 2023, MAK-Schindlers-Scholarship 2019, and the Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2018. Her works have been shown in various venues internationally, including Belvedere 21erHaus, Vienna; Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna); Kunsthaus Hamburg; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; Digital Arts Center, Taipei; 18 Street Art Center, Santa Monica, USA among many others. She is presenting her solo exhibition at the Taipei Fine Art Museum in August.

MIAE SON (ARTIST)

Miae Son (b. Seoul, South Korea) is based in Vienna. Since 2009 she has lived in Germany and Austria focusing on performative video and installation. The artist extracts precise moments of her everyday life as a migrant in Europe, which reflects the complexity of structural issues, that the artist deals with in her work. She studied sculpture in Seoul and Video installation in Bremen and Vienna. She has been awarded numerous grants and prizes, including START-Scholarship of the Federal Ministry for Culture(AT), Short Film Award of the FrauenFilmTage, ArtStart_Studio Scholarship. Her work has recently been presented in group, solo exhibition and at film festivals, such as Bildraum01, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Charim Gallery, Diagonale Graz, Kassel DokFest, Kunsthalle Bremen.

LEONA CHEN (POET)

Leona Chen is the author of Book of Cord, her debut poetry collection exploring the loss of Taiwanese identity through colonization and emigration. Her poems explore histories both recognized and erased, becoming her own protest, journey of self-discovery, and rallying cry for the Taiwanese American community. She is the firstborn of parents raised under martial law in Taiwan, and the great-granddaughter of the aboriginal Ketagalan tribe’s last standing chief.

MEILING CHENG (POET)

Meiling Cheng (b. 1960 in Taipei, Taiwan) is an award-winning poet and essayist, having published numerous poems, short stories, personal essays, and art criticism articles in English and Chinese. The nexus of Dr. Cheng’s research is interdisciplinary performance and live art studies, an area of expertise she cultivated by integrating a strong visual art orientation to her doctoral training in contemporary and avant-garde theatres. She is professor of dramatic arts in theatre critical studies in the USC School of Dramatic Arts and is the author of In Other Los Angelesses: Multicentric Performance Art and Beijing Xingwei: Contemporary Performance: Theatricality Across Genres. She has curated, directed, and performed in live art events in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Tainan.

JESSICA KIM (POET)

Jessica Kim (she/her) is a Korean-American high school junior and poet who has lived in Korea, Singapore, and currently lives in Los Angeles, CA. She identifies as visually-impaired and advocates for the disabled community. Recently, she has been named the 2021-22 Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate and runner-up for the 2022 United States National Youth Poet Laureate. She is the author of L(EYE)GHT, runner-up for the Animal Heart Press’ Chapbook Contest, which has been published in April 2022. 

Come to the Schindler House during visitor service hours 3:00PM — 4:30PM to receive a tarot reading by an invited guest from Renée Petropoulos as an extension programming of her shag carpet installation and proposal for the exhibition Schindler House: 100 Years in the Making. Invited readers include: Jade Gordon (July 1)⁠, Meg Cranston⁠ (August 5), and Asher Hartman (September 2).

First come first serve and free with the price of admission.

Renée Petropoulos

Renée Petropoulos, a Los Angeles native, received her BA, MA, and MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her interest in pattern, repetition, and color is reflected through her public works such as the one found in the Los Angeles Metro Orange Line. She lives in Venice, California and teaches at the Otis College of Art and Design in the Graduate Studies Department.

JADE GORDON

Jade Gordon is an artist, actress, and founding member of the theatrical art collective My Barbarian. My Barbarian recently had a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art that traced their practice over the past two decades. Gordon has recently collaborated with Megan Whitmarsh for the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA.

MEG CRANSTON

Meg Cranston is an artist, writer, and the Chair of the Fine Arts Department at Otis College of Art and Design. Her recent exhibition at the Melistian Briggs Gallery is her fourth solo exhibition.

asher hartman

Asher Hartman is a writer, director, artist, teacher, and founder of Gawdafful National Theater. He was one of four writers whose texts provided the frameworks for the Hammer Museum’s Lifes.

The MAK Center for Art and Architecture is pleased to announce Final Projects: Group LI, exhibiting two installations produced by our Artists and Architects-in-Residence, Kamilla Bischof and Robin Durand. The residents open their respective apartment units to exhibit two unique final project installations, Kamilla Bischof: Princess Bone, and Robin Durand: A Traverse of L.A. Select installation elements stretch out to the Garage Top outdoor courtyard.

Kick off your Labor Day weekend with music, hot dogs, and contemporary art and architecture at the Opening Reception for Final Projects: Group LI, Thursday, September 1st, starting at 6:00 PM. Complemented with an Open House of select Mackey Apartment units. This is a free public event. No RSVP required.

Join the curators of Schindler House 100 on in-person tours of the Schindler House highlighting their unique individual perspectives on the exhibition.

Sarah Hearne

Sarah Hearne is an architectural historian, curator, and educator. She is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver in the Architecture Department. Hearne received her Ph.D in Architectural History from the UCLA with her dissertation “Other Things Visible on Paper: Architectural Writing and Imagining Craftsmanship 1960-87.”