Lina Bo Bardi—A Marvellous Entanglement | A Conversation with Artist Isaac Julien
Isaac Julien in conversation with Esther da Costa Meyer, Professor Emeritus, History of Modern Architecture, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University and Visiting Professor, Yale University; and Sunil Bald, Associate Dean and Professor Adjunct, Yale School of Architecture
About Isaac Julien
Filmmaker and installation artist Sir Isaac Julien KBE RA (b. 1960) rose to prominence in late 1980s Britain amid a charged political climate of state-sanctioned racial violence and the AIDS crisis. For more than four decades, the artist has explored the potential of film to decenter colonial narratives and mine the complexities of desire, migration, race, and sexuality. Julien’s work has been exhibited at museums and galleries throughout Europe and the United States. He has exhibited twice at the Venice Biennale (2015 and 2017), as well as at the 7th Gwangju Bienniale, South Korea (2008); Prospect.1, New Orleans (2008); Performa 07, New York (2007) and documenta11, Kassel (2002). A major survey of Julien’s work, What Freedom is to Me was held at Tate Britain in Spring/Summer 2023. Julien has received many honors and awards, including the Royal Academy’s Charles Wollaston Award (2017), and Kaiserring Goslar Award in 2022. The same year, he was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours
About Esther da Costa Meyer
Esther da Costa Meyer teaches modern architecture and contemporary architecture. A native of Brazil, she specializes in issues of cultural translation involving architecture focusing on buildings erected by colonial powers in the Global South, as well as the emerging cultures of resistance that were themselves highly hybrid, transnational, and diasporic. Interested in issues pertaining to gender and design, she has published on architects Lilly Reich, Charlotte Perriand, and Lina Bo Bardi. Her curatorial work includes the exhibition and catalog Schoenberg, Kandinsky and the Blue Rider, co-curated with Fred Wasserman (The Jewish Museum, New York) and, more recently, an exhibition of the drawings of Frank Gehry, Frank Gehry: On Line (Princeton University Art Museum). Also interested in the historic avant-gardes in architecture, she has published a book on the Italian futurist Antonio Sant’Elia.
About Sunil Bald
After an initial term as Louis. I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor, Mr. Bald has continued to teach design studios and visualization at the School. Previously, he taught design and theory at Cornell University, Columbia University, the University of Michigan, and Parsons. Mr. Bald is a partner in the New York-based Studio SUMO, which has been featured as one of Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard and the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices. In 2015, SUMO was awarded the Annual Prize in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His firm has also received a Young Architects award from the Architectural League, fellowships from NYFA and NYSCA, and was a finalist in the Museum of Modern Art’s Young Architects program. SUMO’s work, which ranges from installations to institutional buildings, has been exhibited in the National Building Museum, MoMA, the Venice Biennale, the Field Museum, the GA Gallery, and the Urban Center. Mr. Bald has an enduring research interest in modernism, popular culture, and nation-making in Brazil, for which he received fellowships from the Fullbright and Graham Foundations and published a series of articles.
