David Hartt and Karthik Pandian in conversation with Hamza Walker

Graham-funded artists David Hartt and Karthik Pandian will discuss new work currently on view in two concurrent exhibitions in Chicago that both engage various strategies and critiques of 1960s avant garde architecture, art, and design practices with curator Hamza Walker. In his current exhibition for everyone a garden, Hartt references utopian projects by architects Moshe Safdie and Jean-Louis Chanéac from the late 1960’s to explore the complex relationship between form and ideology. Similarly, Pandian takes on 1960s artistic strategies in The Incomparables Club, the conclusion of a cycle of recent exhibitions that features the moving image and sound installation Reversal. Concerned with artistic labor, technologies of vision, and nostalgia for the avant-garde, previous iterations of the work took place in different forms at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and Vilma Gold, London in 2012.

Exhibitions:

David Hartt: for everyone a garden

On view through May 11, 2013

Corbett vs Dempsey, Chicago

Karthik Pandian

The Incomparables Club:

On view through April 20, 2013

Reversal:

On view through June 1, 2013

Rhona Hoffman, Chicago

David Hartt was born in Montréal in 1967 and lives and works in Chicago. He graduated with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994. His exhibition Stray Light is currently on view at the Studio Museum in Harlem and will travel in the fall to the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle and in 2014 to the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2012), Golden Age, Chicago (2011); Howard House, Seattle (2009); Deven Golden Fine Art (1998, 1997); Andrew Kreps, New York (1996); L’Observatoire-Galerie, Brussels (1995); and Ten in One, Chicago (1995). In 2012 he was named a United States Artists Cruz Fellow. He is a 2012 recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. Hartt’s exhibition, for everyone a garden is on view at Corbett vs. Dempsey until May 11, 2013.

Karthik Pandian has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; and Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles amongst others. In 2013, his work will be featured in exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris and Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels. Pandian's work has been supported by grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Durfee Foundation and in 2011, he was the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. Pandian’s exhibition, The Incomparables Club is on view at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago through April 20 and the moving image and sound piece Reversal, will remain on view in the second floor space through June 1.

Since 1994, Hamza Walker has served as Director of Education/Associate Curator for The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago - a non-collecting museum devoted to contemporary art. Recent exhibitions he has curated include Black Is, Black Ain’t, (2008), Several Silences, (2009), Anna Shteynshleyger, a survey (2010), The Age of Aquarius (2011), William O’Brien, a survey of the ceramics (2011), Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven: In a Saturnian World, (2011), Local Metrics (2012), and John Neff, Photographs 2010-2012 (2013).. He was the recipient of the 2005 Walter Hopps Award for curatorial achievement, a 2006 Emily Hall Tremaine Award for the exhibition Black Is, Black Ain’t, and the 2010 Ordway Prize. He has written for numerous artists’ monographs in addition to publications such as Artforum and Parkett. Walker is the president of Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts board of trustees.