Hostile Architecture
In conjunction with the Chicago Architecture Biennial
December 10-29, 2021
Featuring Yue Xu and Jasmine Yeh
Curated by Katie Rauth
Expanding on anti-homeless urban design concepts, Hostile Architecture investigates spaces complicated by outside forces. The structures and objects in the gallery space reference existing architecture, examining how oppressive governments have shaped the physical and psychological structures in which we live, and how those structures inflict damage through political silencing and colonization.
Yue Xu and Jasmine Yeh consider the ways in which architecture holds the trauma of political exploitation. In their respective practices, Xu and Yeh use humor to digest complicated questions surrounding personal experience, playing with objects that seem innocent and unassuming, but hold menacing histories. In turn, the work becomes an opportunity to deweaponize and disarm that which has inflicted harm.
How do we thrive when our lives are contained within the walls our oppressors built? How might we shift the cyclical dance of the everyday from the interior of structural power to some political possibility of what is beyond?
