Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation: Transmaterial Politics

Curated by: Ariadna Cantis
Catalogue includes texts by: Felicity D. Scott and Ignacio G. Galán

Tabacalera presents the first major exhibition in Spain of the work of the New York and Madrid based architect and artist Andrés Jaque.  He is the most recent and youngest winner of the Friedrich Kiesler Prize, received the 2014 Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale, and won the 2015 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program. The Office for Political Innovation, the agency he founded in 2003, is dedicated to exploring the political dimension of material practices.

Transmaterial Politics stages a series of constellations that bring into dialogue some of the most important works developed by Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation to inquire into the collective management of plurality and divergence. The exhibition is organized around four notions of the political: Sweet Domestic Arenas (focused on the specific forms of interaction and dispute happening in domestic environments), Cosmopolitics (concerning the mediation between interspecies and transnatural coinhabitance), Sex and the So Called City (about the modes for sex that happen through contemporary transmedia urbanisms), and Performing Publicness (a performative shift in the way public space can be conceived).

The exhibition shows together, for the first time, projects developed by Jaque and the Office in different media and formats: from architectural constructions to performances, research work, and multimedia installations. These projects include IKEA Disobedients (Tabacalera, MoMA, 2012); Superpowers of Ten (Lisbon Triennale, 2013; Chicago Architectural Biennale, 2015; ZKM, Karlsruhe and Museo Jumex, Mexico City, 2016); COSMO (MoMA PS1, New York, 2015); Escaravox (Matadero Madrid, 2012); TUPPER HOME (2007); House in Never Never Land (Ibiza, 2007); Intimate Strangers (London Design Museum, 2016); Sales Oddity (2014 Venice Biennale); and, among others, Phantom: Mies as Rendered Society (Mies van der Rohe Barcelona Pavilion, 2013).  

The work of Andrés Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation has been previously exhibited in many of the most important museums around the world including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the MAK in Vienna, the Tel Aviv Museum of Modern Art, ZKM in Karlsruhe, Museo Júmex in Mexico City, and RedCat Cal Arts in Los Angeles, and is part of numerous major collections. Publications include Everyday Politics, Transmaterial/Calculable, Different Kinds of Water Pouring Into a Swimming Pool, Melnikov, Dulces Arenas Cotidianas, and Phantom: Mies as Rendered Society.