THIS FORM FOLLOWS YOUR PERFORMANCE

Alex Schweder
THIS FORM FOLLOWS YOUR PERFORMANCE

The relationship between occupied spaces and occupying bodies is a shifting one; we subjectively make our built world; thereafter it constructs us as occupying subjects. Working at the intersection of art and architecture, I understand our built environment as a site for playing out fantasies about our bodies. Drawing from a history of buildings designed around perfect bodies, my work seeks to expand this discourse to the experience of lived fleshy bodies. Architecture does not often pose difficult questions to its occupying bodies; art does not often publicly explore uncomfortable topics outside of museums and private spaces. However, at their intersection art and architecture might more productively explore the complicated facets of being human.

Speaker: Alex Schweder is the 2005–2006 Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture. Since this time, Schweder has been experimenting with time and performance based architecture including Flatland at New York's Sculpture Center 2007, This Apple Tastes Like Our Living Room Used to Smell presented at Western Bridge in Seattle 2007, Melting Instructions presented at the Tacoma Art Museum 2007, Homing MacGuffin during New York's Homebase III project 2008, The End of Endless to be presented at the Santa Fe Center For Contemporary Art 2009, and A Sac of Rooms All Day Long to be shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 2009. His work has also been exhibited nationally and internationally including Henry Urbach Architecture in New York, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Netherlands Architecture Institute, and the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Roma. Schweder is the author of 'Stalls Between Walls', in Ladies and Gents, the Gendering of Public Toilets. He is a three time artist in residence at the Kohler company and will be in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Fall of 09. Schweder has been a guest professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in the Fall 07 for the seminar How to Perform Your Own Building. He holds a Masters in Architecture from Princeton University (1998) and a Bachelor in Architecture from Pratt Institute (1993).

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