MY DREAM NEVER HAS WALLS
Only in my poems can I make a home
I have found shelter in no other form
J.J. Slauerhoff
Haleh Redjaian as part of the duo exhibition "My Dream Has No Walls" with Fernanda Fragateiro.
A common inspiration for this exhibition is Lotte Stam-Beese (1903-1988): an architect, urban planner and photographer. Born in German Silesia (now Poland), Lotte Beese enrolled as a student at the Bauhaus in Dessau to study weaving. Prejudices about women studying subjects that were dominated by and previously reserved for men, led female students into branches that were considered ‘feminine’. When Hannes Meyer succeeded Walter Gropius as director, Beese became the first woman to study in the building department. During the interwar years she worked consecutively in architect’s offices in Berlin, Moscow, Charkov, Brno, and Amsterdam, and married Dutch architect Mart Stam. After their divorce she kept the name because this affiliation could give her a head start as an independent female architect in the Netherlands. From 1946, as chief-architect at the Agency for Urban Development and Reconstruction of Rotterdam, Stam-Beese worked on several (social) housing districts around the city. On the one hand, she kept on working with the universalist, rational principals of Functionalist architecture. On the other hand, she developed concepts (e.g. ‘neighborhood’ and ‘cluster’) to integrate notions of locality, diversity, complexity into her architectural grids.
Plans by Lotte Stam-Beese for social housing served as a point of departure for both artists. While Fragateiro started a series of sculptures derived from the layout of one particular apartment, Redjaian based drawings and collages on plans of a larger, urban scale. However different their respective mediums and approach, both artists started from some grid, pattern or rhythm they’ve discerned in their source material.
13 May - 24 June 2023
