Riet Eeckhout and Arnaud Hendrickx present the exhibition Drawing Conversations | Autour du dessin
At the Design Centre de UQUAM, Montreal, Canada
On Representation and its Investigation | Pratiques de la représentation, pratiques de conversation:
Laura Allen, Bryan Cantley, Nat Chard, Peter Cook, Mark Dorrian, Riet Eeckhout, Perry Kulper, C.J. Lim, Shaun Murray, Mark Smout, Nei Spiller, Natalija Subotincic, Michael Webb, Mark West and Michael Young.
Drawing Conversations is an invitation to talk about drawing, through drawing. Presented at UQAM’s Design Centre, this exhibition brings together the work of 16 architects and academics in an exchange on contemporary drawing practices in architecture. The exhibition leads us to consider drawing beyond its qualities as a graphic object to glimpse the open conversation it sets up, a dialogue that is as much individual (with oneself as a practitioner) as it is collective (with other drawings, people and practices).
https://drawingconversations.uqam.ca/en/
Grounded simultaneously in the real world and in a world-in-making, each drawing and each conversation is an opportunity to explore the drawing’s intend, material conditions, techniques and the way one is moved to talk about it. The exhibition gives the opportunity to trace these possible worldsand to engage in exchanges about the practice of drawing, about architecture, about those who draw.
The exhibition originates from the meeting between the curators, Carole Lévesque and Thomas-Bernard Kenniff, and the Drawing Architecture research project initiated by Riet Eeckhout and Arnaud Hendrickx of KU Leuven university in Belgium. The project convened biannual meetings between a group of renowned international practitioners, offering them the opportunity to discuss their drawing practice. In a world premiere, Drawing Conversations offers a pause on these encounters by foregrounding their collective interrogation through drawings put in conversation. The exhibition expands on these encounters by focusing on the capacity of drawing to engage reflection on modes of representation, design practices and research fields, and the role of this reflection in the construction of a common world. It focuses on the collective exercise of interrogation and around drawing as a mechanism of interaction.
The exhibition
Drawing Conversations brings together a remarkable corpus of drawings, the majority of which have never been shown to the public, punctuated by sound extracts from conversations recorded during the group’s meetings over the past four years. These conversations, initially restricted to the collective, are expanded in the exhibition as it itself creates a space for new dialogues: The exhibition will host the 2nd international colloquium of BéPI (Bureau d’étude de pratiques indisciplinées), -in drawing, from 14 to 16 September, and drawing workshops open to the public, led by five participants in the exhibition from Europe and Canada, from 24 to 27 October.
Publications:
The work of the 16 artists and designers is the subject of a special issue of AD (Architectural Design) journal: Radical Architectural Drawing (July 2022)
A book on the work of the collective is also in production: Drawing Architecture: Conversations on Contemporary Practice (Nov 2022)
Exhibition Credits:
Curators: Carole Lévesque et Thomas-Bernard Kenniff
Initiator of the project:
Riet Eeckhout
Arnaud Hendrickx
Participants in the exhibition:
Laura Allen, Bryan Cantley, Nat Chard, Peter Cook, Mark Dorrian, Riet Eeckhout, Adrian Hawker, Perry Kulper, CJ Lim, Shaun Murray, Mark Smout, Neil Spiller, Nada Subotincic, Michael Webb, Mark Westand Michael Young
Spatial design
Arnaud Hendrickx