Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism

Abstract

The lecture is the fourth in a six-part public lecture program, entitled Contexts for Architectural Speculation, bringing together nationally and internationally acclaimed thinkers in architecture and/or its related academic disciplines like urban studies, social geography, globalization, and political theory. Lecturers will reflect on the larger social, political, and economic situation that defines the context in which architects operate today. Martha Rosler is a artist living in Brooklyn, New York. She works in video, photo-text, installation, and performance; she also writes about art and culture. Her work in the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience, ranges from the link between social life and the media to architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to systems of transport. Her work has been seen in the Venice Biennale; the Liverpool Biennial and the Taipei Biennial, as well as the Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany, and several Whitney biennials. She has had numerous solo exhibitions. A retrospective of her work, Positions in the Life World, was shown in five European cities and concurrently at the International Center of Photography and the New Museum for Contemporary Art. Rosler has published numerous essays and ten books of photography, art and writing. Among them are Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Essays 1975-2001 (MIT Press, 2004) and the photo books Passionate Signals (Cantz, 2005), In the Place of the Public: Airport Series (Cantz, 1997), and Rites of Passage (NYFA, 1995). Rosler was been awarded the Spectrum International Prize in Photography for 2005, which was accompanied by a photo and video retrospective at the Sprengel Museumin Hanover and at NGBK in Berlin, Germany. She was recently awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Guggenheim Museum.