Artist Talk by Katarina Burin

Tuesday, Sep 10 2019, 7:30 PM - 8:30 PM, Tishman Lecture Hall
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Tuesday, Sep 10 2019 7:30 PM Tuesday, Sep 10 2019 8:30 PM America/New_York Artist Talk by Katarina Burin OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Artist Katarina Burin discusses the history of women in twentieth-century design and her invention of the fictional modernist architect Petra Andrejova-Molnàr Tishman Lecture Hall Bennington College

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Katarina Burin's "Authorship, Architecture, Anonymity: The Impossible Career of Petra Andrejova-Molnàr" will be on view in Usdan Gallery through October 13. There will be an opening reception on September 10. 

In 2008, Katarina Burin felt the urge to design a monogram—but not for herself. An artist whose practice had long explored the social instincts of European twentieth-century modernist design, Burin imagined a female Czech architect from the interwar years and conjured the fictional Petra Andrejova-Molnàr, also known as P.A. Burin spent a decade developing an entire career for P.A., conducting meticulous historical research to aid her production of models and drawings; décor such as furniture, ceramics, textiles, and wallpaper; and ephemera such as photographs, letters, and catalogs that anchor P.A. within design circles that rarely included women despite their utopian goals. In this way, P.A. is both real and unreal, an amalgam of the marginalized or anonymous women who contributed to the modernist program and, at the same time, a personification of creative longing and ghostly absence.

Usdan Gallery is delighted to survey the full P.A. project, a complex, feminist enterprise that foregrounds the collectivist zeal of modernism and critiques the erasure of women designers from the modernist canon. Authorship, Architecture, Anonymity marks the conclusion of Burin’s production as P.A. and forms a timely addition to this year’s wave of international exhibitions on the centennial of the founding of the Bauhaus, the legendary German design school that welcomed women but barred them from studying architecture. Prior considerations of Burin’s work have leaned toward presenting P.A. as a forgotten or recently discovered architectural gem, confounding audiences into questioning assumptions about gender and history. By straightforwardly acknowledging Burin as the author of P.A., the Usdan exhibit positions her at the forefront of current efforts to recognize the pivotal role of women in architecture and the fundamental condition of architecture as collaborative, contesting the enduring stereotype of the “genius” male architect. Among critiques that are usually textual, Burin’s project is all the more intriguing for being visual: having allowed herself to be possessed by the spirit of a past moment, the artist has made manifest the archive that would have been.