Chicago Architectural Biennial 5: This is a Rehearsal
Pia Singh, The Brooklyn Rail
February 2024
The question of whether the biennial is specific to the city as a stage for rehearsal, or if it can be seen as a stage for rehearsing resistances to the metrics of Western modernity, is debatable. Vyjayanthi V. Rao’s, Kush Badhwar’s, and Sagarika Sundaram’s film-based installation with soft, felted tent-like walls as its frame, Monumental Returns (2023), materializes research on the slow violence of development in South India’s Telangana region. Anupama Kundoo’s Building with fire: Volontariat Homes for Homeless Children (2008–10) reinforces Ray Meeker’s self-fired, water-resistant dome housing in Pondicherry as an in-progress model on site. Amanda Williams’s Redefining Redlining (2022) draws on a palimpsest of ephemera, documenting the planting of 100,000 red tulips that redraw the architectural footprint of twenty-one demolished homes on Prairie Avenue and 53rd Street. Protest site or tribute, participants “in-rehearsal” in their communities excavate the impact of generational divestment. […]