'86 Things' Exhibition of NEMESTUDIO Work Displayed Through May 14 in Vol Walker Hall

Jessica Fraley

"86 Things," an exhibition of recent work by NEMESTUDIO, will be on display through May 14 in the Fred and Mary Smith Exhibition Gallery in Vol Walker Hall on the U of A campus. It is part of the public exhibition series in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.

The exhibition "86 Things" will be on display through May 14 in the Fred and Mary Smith Exhibition Gallery in Vol Walker Hall on the U of A campus. This is part of the public exhibition series in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.

This exhibition presents the recent work by NEMESTUDIO, an architectural practice based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Neyran Turan, an architect and a partner at NEMESTUDIO, will give a virtual gallery talk at noon March 31. Register for the gallery talk on Zoom.

Turan is also an associate professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of California-Berkeley. Her work focuses on alternative forms of environmental imagination within architecture and their capacity for new aesthetic and political trajectories within architecture and urbanism.

"We're excited to host Turan's transformation of the Smith Exhibition Gallery into a colorful, multimedia immersion into architectural speculation," said Charles Sharpless, assistant professor of interior design and exhibitions coordinator in the Fay Jones School. "In the depictions of landscapes, cityscapes, stage sets and rooms, we see a world that is not so easily divided into distinct disciplines or territories of design. Instead, this exhibition makes apparent the fundamental interconnectedness of all human activities as design activities that are continuously physically reshaping our planet and reframing our subjective experience of the built environment."

There are 86 things in this exhibition: 33 drawings, 14 podiums, eight models, six videos, two backdrops, three photoshoot lights, two dollies, one ladder, one water bottle, five headphones, three wooden boards and eight wooden pieces. The drawings are presented through a backdrop, the models are in a photoshoot, and the exhibition itself is a construction site.

Through its flipping of the foreground and the background in its presentation, "86 Things" is a space of architecture's own making, assembly and unmaking. On the one hand, it disassembles the making of architecture and reassembles it as a staged event. On the other, while exhausting specific procedures of architectural work, it presents architecture somewhere in between representation and construction.

"The work affirms the value of the architectural drawing as a means of analysis and a representation of form," Sharpless said, "but most importantly the drawings, models and videos here are vehicles for speculation, narration and imagination of new design objects, buildings and worlds."

The exhibition design team includes Neyran Turan, Michelle Deng, Ian Erickson and Ryan Shin.

NEMESTUDIO has been recognized with several awards, most recently the Architectural League New York Prize for Young Architects, multiple citations at The Architect's Newspaper Best of Design Awards, Notable Award at the Core 77 Design Awards, and multiple Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts awards.

The work of the practice has been exhibited internationally at venues that include the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York; Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism; Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco; Pratt Manhattan Gallery; Betts Project gallery in London; Druker Design Gallery at the Harvard Graduate School of Design; Yale School of Architecture; Aedes Gallery in Berlin; Chicago Architecture Biennial; Istanbul Design Biennial; Parsons New School of Design Gallery in New York; Wurster Gallery in Berkeley; and SALT in Istanbul.

Turan holds a Doctor of Design from Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), a Master of Environmental Design from Yale University School of Architecture, and a Bachelor of Architecture from Istanbul Technical University.

Turan is founding chief-editor of the Harvard GSD journal New Geographies, which focuses on contemporary issues of urbanism and architecture, and is the editor-in-chief of the first two volumes of the journal: New Geographies 0 and New Geographies: After Zero. Her recently published book Architecture as Measure (ACTAR Publishers, 2020) has been awarded by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. She was recently selected to curate the Pavilion of Turkey in the 2021 Venice Biennale 17th International Architecture Exhibition.

Admission to the exhibition is free. The exhibition gallery is located on the first floor of Vol Walker Hall, and it is open to the public from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. The U of A campus will be closed Friday, March 26, for spring break.