Adam Bandler

Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, New York

March 31 — May 14, 2016

Graham Foundation, Chicago

September 15 — December 31, 2016

Curated by Florencia Alvarez, Adam Bandler, and Mark Wasiuta

Exhibition Design: Adam Bandler and Mark Wasiuta

The exhibition examines the work of Iraqi architect Rifat Chadirji through the collection of his photographs held at the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut. With the work of his architectural office, Iraq Consult, and in his other roles, Chadirji became a pivotal cultural figure in Baghdad during the period of its postwar modernization. As an urban planner, as an architect, and as a government minister, Chadirji was central to the organization and consolidation of the image of the postwar city and helped foster the emergence and growth of ministries, monopolies, cinemas, police stations, communication centers, and the other new building types associated with the independent state. 

Despite the long historical continuity his regionally inflected modernism evoked, Chadirji was all too aware of the transformative effects of Iraq’s growing oil economy and the instability of the new state. His work as a photographer was informed by Iraq’s political and cultural precariousness, while it foresaw greater disruption ahead. Over a span of thirty years, Chadirji recorded the street-life, tribal rituals, other social practices and spaces that he believed were threatened by the forces driving Iraq’s postwar evolution. Over the same period he meticulously photographed his own architectural work in an attempt to produce documents that could survive the inevitable destruction of his buildings within the turmoil he anticipated. 

The exhibition will position the threat that lurks within Chadirji’s photographs in relation to the current instability in Iraq and Syria and the continuing specter of building destruction and cultural violence. The texture of precarity within Chadirji’s photographs will also underscore the institutional project of the Arab Image Foundation and its attempt to reassemble a photographic history of the Arab World from the ashes of civil war, and other forms of damage, suppression and erasure. In this sense, Chadirji’s photographs exhibit at least three document identities: they are an informational system describing every building within his architectural oeuvre; they are a device to preserve the image of Iraq’s experience of modernization; and they are the charged signifiers of conflict, collateral damage, and the historical and cultural vulnerability that marks and forms the archives of the Arab Image Foundation. 

Graphic Design: MTWTF

Photography (New York): James Ewing

Photography (Chicago): RCH | EKH

Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, New York

Feb 14 — Mar 12, 2016

Curators: Felicity Scott and Mark Wasiuta

Assistant Curators: Adam Bandler and Florencia Alvarez

Exhibition Design: Adam Bandler and Mark Wasiuta

Les Levine: Bio-Tech Rehearsals, 1965-1975 revisits the early, multi-faceted practices of Irish-Canadian artist Les Levine. Drawing extensively from the artist’s archive, the exhibition brings together his: early plastic disposables; remote-fabricated, systems-oriented, and “real time” environments; cybernetic sculptures, audio-surveillance, and other “body control systems” works. 

The exhibition screens sixteen of Levine’s early video projects ranging from Bum, a 1965 chronicle of the lives and testimonies of men living on New York’s Bowery, to later pieces, such as Landscape II, in which Levine directs and manipulates live editing effects within a TV control room. Across Levine’s video experiments and other work from the period the exhibition finds the artist examining, deploying, and interrupting different facets of information flow. Indeed, in 1968 Levine was heralded by critic Jack Burnham as, “the most consistent exponent of a systems esthetic.” His often-ironic engagement with the technologies and material products, as well as the post-Fordist systems and operations of the contemporary media-technical apparatus was directed both to the art world and to what he termed “living patterns.” His work consistently spoke to ambivalent mechanisms of institutional, environmental, and subjective regulation. 

Les Levine: Bio-Tech Rehearsals, 1965-1975 returns to this early decade of Levine’s work, excavating rarely shown works and documents and demonstrating his connection not only to Burnham but also to Gregory Battcock, William Burroughs, James Lee Byars, John Giorno, Jill Johnston, Charlemagne Palestine, and more.

Graphic Design: MTWTF

Exhibition Photography: James Ewing

Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, New York

September  18 — Nov 20, 2015

Istanbul Design Biennial, Turkey

October 23 — Nov 20, 2016

Curators: Adam Bandler and Mark Wasiuta

Assistant Curator: Florencia Alvarez

Exhibition Design: Adam Bandler and Mark Wasiuta

Initially proposed for Expo 67 in Montreal, Buckminster Fuller’s World Game was played for the first time in 1969 at the New York Studio School for Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture. Over the next decade the World Game evolved and expanded through workshops, seminars, strategy papers, and building designs. Across its different manifestations, the World Game remained focused on the goals of overcoming energy scarcity and altering conventional territorial politics through the redistribution of world resources. This anti-Malthusian, anti-war game was meant to discover conditions for perpetual ecological peace and to usher in a new era of total global resource consciousness. Mirroring cold war command and control infrastructures, proposals for World Game centers described a vast computerized network that could process, map, and visualize environmental information drawn from, among other sources, Russian and American spy satellites. Fuller claimed that their optical sensors and thermographic scanners could detect the location and quantity of water, grain, metals, livestock, human populations, or any other conceivable form of energy. 

Among Fuller’s abiding obsessions was the limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum available to human vision. Fuller argued that the World Game would serve as a corrective to this limitation by rendering visible global environmental data patterns that evaded normal perception. 

Assembling documents related to various iterations of the World Game conceived, proposed and played from 1964 to 1982 and material from the World Resources Inventory, the exhibition examines the World Game as an experimental pedagogical project, as a system for environmental information, and as a process of resource administration. A related symposium will bring together scholars and architects with Fuller partners and collaborators to speak about the World Game in relation to its ecological, informational vision, and to the current stakes for environmental data and its representation. 

Graphic Design: MTWTF

Photography (New York): James Ewing

Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, New York

October 7 — November 14, 2015

Chicago Architecture Biennial, Chicago

October 3, 2015 — Jan 3, 2016

LAXART, Los Angeles

February 18, 2017 — April 1, 2017

Curators: Adam Bandler, Marcos Sanchez, Mark Wasiuta

Assistant Curator: Florencia Alvarez

Exhibition Design: Adam Bandler, Marcos Sanchez, Mark Wasiuta

Working in Venice, California from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, Environmental Communications (EC), a collective of architects, photographers and psychologists, honed an image practice aimed at carving out a new visual syntax for the late-20th-century city. With debts to LA’s electronically mediated counterculture and its conceptual photography movement, their practice was attuned to the spatial, mediatic, and social forces they documented in Tokyo, the American Southwest, and, most often, Los Angeles, their primary object of analysis. The group speculated that their “environmental photography” would transform architecture and shift the consciousness of architecture students via the university slide library. Its technique consisted of sensitizing oneself to the Los Angeles “environment” with the goal of registering normally imperceptible environmental conditions and transformations. 

Environmental Communications eventually shot and organized tens of thousands of slides, forming a vast taxonomic system for documenting Southern California’s urban and environmental geography. Organizing thematic slide sets with titles such as “Human Territoriality in the City,” “Ultimate Crisis,” and “Hardcore LA,” they experimented with the behavior-altering capacity of images as they pursued their goal of developing “systems of perception.” Assembled into these thematic series their slides were sold via the Environmental Communications Catalog to museums, cultural institutions and to an international network of architecture schools. Through their media experiments, events and slide catalogs they positioned themselves as interpreters and purveyors of new architectural and environmental trends, assembling a mass inventory of images to resist the buildings and monuments that dominated architecture and its institutions.

Graphic Design: MTWTF

Exhibition Photography (New York): James Ewing

Exhibition Photography (Chicago): Tom Harris

Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, New York

February 12 — March 15, 2014

Curators: David Reinfurt and Robert Wiesenberger

Associate Curator: Mark Wasiuta

Exhibition Design: Adam Bandler

Muriel Cooper worked across four decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in overlapping roles as a graphic designer, teacher, and researcher. Spanning the transition from print, to early explorations of digital typography, to fully evolved information environments, Cooper’s tenure at MIT maps onto one of the most dynamic periods of the school’s technical, conceptual and theoretical development. 

As the first Design Director of the MIT Press, Cooper established a comprehensive publishing program and designed books like The Bauhaus (1969) and Learning from Las Vegas (1972). As co-founder of the Visible Language Workshop, she taught experimental printing, tested large-format Polaroid photography, and integrated video systems in MIT’s Department of Architecture. And at the MIT Media Lab, she developed some of the earliest computer interfaces and educated a generation of designers. Throughout, her approach remained consistent: creating tools and systems for rapid feedback, dissolving boundaries between design and production, and restlessly seeking out new problems.

Graphic Design: David Reinfurt

Exhibition Photography: James Ewing

Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, New York

April 16 — May 25, 2013

2-Channel Video by Tony Oursler

Curators: Branden Joseph and Mark Wasiuta

Assistant Curator: Adam Bandler

Exhibition Design: Adam Bandler and Mark Wasiuta

The exhibition presents two sets of images drawn from artist Tony Oursler’s extensive photographic archives. The two collections serve not only to open new perspectives onto the more well-known aspects of Oursler’s artistic production, but also to raise a larger set of questions about the “rhetoric” of the photographic image. Among other important distinctions, the two sets of photographs exhibit different mediatic temperatures. The heightened realism of the “hot” effigy photos and the “cool” objectivity of the UFO photography occupy competing and symmetrically opposite evidentiary positions. Each set strains against the outer edges of the truth claims that were culturally invested in photography, particularly as it functioned prior to the widespread adoption of digital photography and the electronic distribution of imagery via the Internet. 

For the exhibition, Oursler has produced a new video composed entirely of UFO and effigy imagery drawn from YouTube. Oursler’s new piece embraces one medium (streaming digital video) in order to reflect upon the loss of another (pre-digital photography). In so doing, it suggests a dialectic between the persistence of popular customs and modes of belief and the mutability of the means and media by which they are culturally embodied and communicated.

Graphic Design: MTWTF

Exhibition Photography: James Ewing

Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, New York

November 08 — December 21, 2012

Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago

April 23 — July 10, 2015

Curators: Elka Krajewska and Mark Wasiuta

Exhibition Design: Adam Bandler and Mark Wasiuta

Drawn from the art insurance lexicon, the term “salvage art” refers to works removed from art circulation due to accidental damage. Salvage pieces are subject to a peculiar and transformative actuarial logic. Once “total loss” status has been declared and indemnification has been paid, salvage art is considered officially devoid of value. Its objects are cast into art’s nether world, no longer alive for the market, gallery or museum system, but often still relatively intact. Salvage art is liberated from the burden of constant valuation and the obligation of exchange, yet abandoned to the invisibility of perpetual storage. 

In spring 2012, the Salvage Art Institute accepted a gift of its first salvage art inventory, which comprises the core of the exhibition. The salvaged works in No Longer Art: Salvage Art Institute are identified by their SAI acquisition numbers. A numerical index relates each piece to its insurance claim, and to the process of evaluation and judgment through which it has been made salvage and transmuted into “no longer art.” Where available documentation describing the damage and the steps toward total loss designation is displayed. 

The Salvage Art Institute’s mandate is to maintain the separation of value from its no longer art inventory. No Longer Art: Salvage Art Institute, the first public appearance of the SAI, follows this objective, simultaneously opening the inventory to scrutiny while attempting to momentarily suspend the force of attraction between its objects and value.

Graphic Design: MTWTF

Exhibition Photography: James Ewing

14th Venice Architecture Biennale, Arsenale, Venice

Jun 7 — November 23, 2014

Curators: Marco Fusinato, Felicity Scott, Mark Wasiuta

Exhibition Design: Adam Bandler and Mark Wasiuta

La fine del mondo has been produced by Marco Fusinato, Felicity D. Scott and Mark Wasiuta on the occasion of their contribution to the section Monditalia at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia, June 7 to November 23, 2014. Their installation, also titled La fine del mondo, is comprised of this print document along with sensor-triggered audio-visual components depicting related records from Turin's Piper Club of 1966 and three Milanese centri sociali: Leoncavallo, Cox18, and Virus. Staging encounters between the Piper Club and centri sociali, both the print document and audio-visual format aim to provoke questions about the design and management of nightclubs and social spaces conceived as sites of political mediation and under the auspice of participation and self-governance. Arising before and after the late-1960s political eruptions in Italy, and marked by distinct patterns of cultural exchange, migration, and industrial transformation, the differences between—and continuities across—these environments speak in provocative ways to Italy’s imbrication within the wider system of global capital. What sort of apparatus, we ask, is materialized in each? The images and archival documents presented herein have been prepared with the assistance of, and in collaboration with, Andrea Membretti, Pietro Derossi, Elena Hileg Iannuzzi, and Marco Philopat.

DESTE Foundation, Athens

June 21 — October 21, 2012

Studio X-Istanbul, Turkey

November 08, 2013 — January 07, 2014

Curators: Craig Buckley and Mark Wasiuta

Assistant Curators: Adam Bandler, Jordan Carver, and Troy Therrien

Exhibition Design: Adam Bandler, Craig Buckley, Jordan Carver, Troy Therrien, and Mark Wasiuta

Collecting Architecture Territories samples and presents the research of twin studio and seminar courses held at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) that have emerged from an art-architecture, cultural-academic collaboration with the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art. The studio and seminar reflect on the relationship between architecture and collecting, considering architecture both as an agent that organizes, supports, and informs various contemporary collecting practices, and as an object of collection in its own right. 

One of the most significant developments reshaping the domain of art and architectural practice over the last three decades is the veritable explosion of institutions and foundations that have emerged out of private collections. The sheer breadth and diversity of such institutions—ranging from experimental new museums to renovated industrial, commercial, or military buildings, and from long term installations to highly temporary exhibitions—demands analysis. Collecting Architecture Territories proposes that the historical institution of the museum, forged by the culture of the Enlightenment is no longer sufficient to describe the expanded territory in which the practices of artists, collectors, curators, and architects now operate. By extension it asks if our understanding of collecting itself has been altered by recent architectural articulations beyond the space of the museum and new art institutions. 

Graphic Design: MTWTF

Exhibition Photography: Panos Kokkinias

LUMA Foundation, Arles

July 05 — September 15, 2015

Museum of Modern Art, New York

June 18, 2016 — January 8, 2017

LUMA Curators: Tom Eccles and Beatrix Ruf

MoMA Curators: Stuart Comer and Erica Papernik-Shimizu

Theater Design (LUMA and MoMA): Adam Bandler and Jessica Rivera

Library Design (LUMA): Adam Bandler and Jessica Rivera

Tony Oursler’s Imponderable (2015–16) offers an alternative depiction of modernism that reveals the intersection of technological advancements and occult phenomena over the last two centuries. Presented in a “5-D” cinematic environment utilizing a contemporary form of Pepper’s ghost—a 19th-century phantasmagoric device—and a range of sensory effects (scents, vibrations, etc.), Imponderable is an immersive feature-length film inspired by Oursler’s own archive of ephemera relating to stage magic, spirit photography, pseudoscience, telekinesis, and other manifestations of the paranormal. Drawing on these objects, Imponderable weaves together a social, spiritual, and empirical history of the virtual image that overlaps with the artist’s own family history. A cast of characters including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, Mina “Margery” Crandon, and members of Oursler’s family are portrayed by an eclectic ensemble of artists, musicians, and performers including Kim Gordon, Jim Fletcher, Keith Sanborn, and Constance DeJong. Bringing together Oursler’s ongoing interest in mysticism, psychedelia, popular culture, and media history, the work employs macabre humor and theatrical surrealism to reflect on the irrational relationship between belief systems and the authenticity of images. Imponderable is presented in conjunction with selections from Oursler’s archive relating to the film. 

This exhibition coincides with Tony Oursler: The Imponderable Archive, on view at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, June 25–October 30, 2016. Imponderable was originally commissioned and produced by the LUMA Foundation for the Parc des Ateliers, Arles, France, and LUMA Westbau, Zurich, Switzerland, 2015.

Original soundtrack by JG Thirlwell. Scents created by International Flavors & Fragrances Inc.

Exhibition Photography (LUMA): Stefan Altenburger

Exhibition Photography (MoMA): Jonathan Muzikar

CCS Hessel Museum, Bard College, New York

June 25, 2016 — Oct 30, 2016

Curator: Tom Eccles

Exhibition Design: Adam Bandler and Jessica Rivera

Imponderable is an extensive research project, exhibition, film, and publication that investigates the personal collection of American artist Tony Oursler, a remarkable trove of more than 2,500 photographs, documents, publications, and unique objects, tracking a social, spiritual, and intellectual history dating back to the early eighteenth century. The actual objects within the archive will be shown for the first time in this comprehensive exhibition, extending the previous iterations of Imponderable commissioned by the LUMA Foundation in Arles and Zurich, where the 4D film and publication were originally presented in 2015. 

The project’s title, Imponderable, suggests the idea of something that cannot be determined with accuracy. Eighteenth-century scientists used the word to describe magnetism, electricity, and other unquantifiable energies, many of which are represented in Oursler’s archive. The ‘imponderable’ also suggests an area of open speculation populated by numerous conflicting belief systems. Additionally, Oursler is interested in how even the most incredible ideas can be presented in such a way that they convince the audience of their veracity. 

The landscape of the archive covers numerous categories such as: stage magic, thought photography, demonology, cryptozoology, optics, Mesmerism, automatic writing, hypnotism, fairies, cults, pareidolia, the occult, color theory, and UFOs. Oursler’s initial research into these fringe practices of media histories and occult phenomenon led the artist further into ideas of speculative thought, the boundaries of science, the use of the spectacular, all of which resonate with contemporary pop culture. For Oursler, nested and mirrored within this archive, is also an intriguing family history that includes his grandfather, Fulton Oursler, Houdini, and the author Arthur Conan Doyle.

Studio X - Istanbul, Turkey

November 01 — December 14, 2014

Project by: Adam Bandler, Marcos Sanchez, and Mark Wasiuta

September 14, 1955. 

High: 93 degrees F

Ozone Peak: .64 parts per million

Inversion lid at 1000 feet

First Stage Smog Alert

The reconstitution of historical smog expands the object of preservation to include the corrosive air that infiltrated postwar architecture as well as the toxins and chemicals that conditioned the urban ecology of postwar Los Angeles. Conventionally, precisely these caustic agents would be excluded from any preservation project that would seek to isolate, secure and rescue architecture from L.A.’s smog effects. Yet, L.A.’s spaces, buildings, vision and urban imaginary have been colored and historically altered by this constant backdrop of iridescent or murky toxicity as much as by other forces. L.A.’s atmosphere is not only a protean body of polluted air that hovers in the distance; it is a cultural artifact that permeates the city, its population and its architecture. 

Guided by the AQMD archive’s reversibility the project is divided into two categories. “Record,” indicates how air is sampled and its contents analyzed. “Replay,” describes how an atmospheric chamber is used to reconstruct photochemical smog from the air analysis. Via this set of instructions we reproduce 2880 cubic feet of air sampled by the APCD Central Station in downtown Los Angeles on the selected dates in an atmospheric testing chamber constructed within the gallery.

Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil

September 6 — December 07, 2014

Featuring two films by Mark Lewis

Installation Design: Adam Bandler and Mark Wasiuta

Invention is a multi-year, multi-channel video project exploring Lewis’ thesis that the invention of the modern city in the nineteenth century is the invention of cinema itself - an accumulation of bodies, shadows, reflections, and perspectives set in motion by the new material and mechanical technologies and schedules of the modern urban environment. In the films, he meticulously records the dynamism and flux of these bodies, materials, and technologies, constructing an artificial ‘city without cinema’ whereby the city itself replicates the perspectival and temporal structures of film. 

For the premier at the 2014 Sao Paulo Art Biennial, Lewis comissioned architects Adam Bandler and Mark Wasiuta to reinterpret this thesis spatially, to construct this ‘city without cinema’. The architects used glass in various geometrical and spatial configurations, opacities, and reflectivities, forming an apparatus to see the city of Sao Paulo, the Oscar Niemeyer building, the films themselves, and the bodies passing through the space.

Benaki Museum, Athens

June 25 — October 12, 2014

Comissioned by: DESTE Foundation

Curated by: Nadja Argyropoulou, Adam Bandler, Mark Wasiuta

Exhibition Design: Adam Bandler, Farzin Lotfi-Jam, Jessica Rivera, and Mark Wasiuta

The destefashioncollection is an incremental, evolving project conceived by the DESTE Foundation to consider and trouble the boundary between art and fashion. Each year since 2007 the destefashioncollection has commissioned an artist to survey that season’s International fashion offerings and to select five related works. These pieces form the artist’s own capsule collection. 

Pariticpating artists include: Michael Amzalag & Mathias Augustyniak (M/M Paris)- 2007, Juergen Teller - 2008, Helmut Lang - 2009, Patrizia Cavalli - 2010, Charles Ray - 2011, Athina Rachel Tsangari - 2012, Diller Scofidio +Renfro - 2013, and Maria Papadimitriou – 2014. 

The exhibition DESTEFASHIONCOLLECTION: 1 to 8 assembles the first eight years of capsules and projects. It seeks to compare the artists’ fashion selections and their interpretations, and to expose the ligatures, relays and exchanges within the components of the collection, which also include artists' books and publications produced especially for each capsule. 

Neither solely about fashion or art, the exhibition builds on the tensions, affinities, and distance between the two and the problem of contemporariness revealed in their relationship. 

Exhibition Photography: Matthew Monteith and George Sfakianakis

MAC's, Grand-Hornu, Belgium

November 17, 2013 — February 23, 2014

Comissioned by: Modern Art Museum of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation

Exhibition Design: Adam Bandler and Jessica Rivera

By departing from the predefined framework when dreaming up his projections, Tony Oursler revolutionised the art of the video, notably with his “sculpture-screen” concept. Today he is one of the greatest American visual artists of our era and is the man behind, amongst others, David Bowie’s Where are we now? video. His art takes us to unexpected universes where fragments of bodies, ghosts and dolls mingle. 

Charmed by the Grand-Hornu as a place of remembrance, as well as by the architectural spaces occupied by the Modern Art Museum of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation – MAC’s, the artist came up with two new works especially for the occasion. In the first he invests the tombs in the mausoleum of the De Gorge family, founder of the site, in the second he pays homage to Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, the Liège scholar who invented phantasmagory back in the 18th century. The rest of the exhibition, which does not aspire to be a retrospective, will be dedicated to significant earlier works from his creative universe.

Ekeberg Sculpture Park, Oslo

Installed Aug, 2013 (permanent)

Comissioned by: C. Ludens Ringnes Foundation

Installation Design: Adam Bandler and Jessica Rivera

Three permanent site-specific installations created for the inauguration of Ekeberg Sculpture Park in Oslo, Norway: Klang, a large-scale video cave, Spectral Power, an iconic talking lamppost, and Cognitive / Dissonance, two complementary tree projections. 

Inspired by the history of Nordic telecommunications and specifically by the pre-historic ruins at the Ekebergparken site in Oslo, Norway, Klang erupts vertically from the ground to the stars in an imaginary arch connecting to three other elements in the park produced by Oursler, to form a high-tech son et lumiere. The artist stated, "Visually we travel through the performative human formation of runes to the geometric optical telegraph, continuing on with cellular technology and the ever present information cloud represented by the projections into the trees." Inside this cavern covered with local vegetation, complex video images are embedded and silhouetted through blackened steel apertures. The trace of human mark making can be found here, revealing early coalescence of language. Images glow in layered iconic loops, in gestures, signs, diagrams, formulas, and inscriptions. Performers of all ages interact with symbols and a variety of signals, metaphorically moving language from the hand to mouth and finally to telecommunications. The frenetic pictorial plane appears ever-changing, interacting not only internally but also with the natural surroundings of its permanent home, the woods of Ekeberg, rich with plant and animal life, human heritage, and omniscient history.