The Emotional Tapestry of Urban Spaces
OPENING
Saturday, February 1, 2025 6-8 pm
ON VIEW
February 1-23, 2025
Friday–Sunday 1–6pm and by appointment
The Emotional Tapestry of Urban Spaces
This exhibition explores the emotional undercurrents within urban spaces and the profound ways in which individuals and communities relate to their environments. Urban planning generally prioritizes strict rationality and function over human experience. As a result, it often dismisses the crucial role emotions play in how we live, remember, and connect with spaces. This exhibition seeks to challenge this standard by elevating the overlooked affects—emotions, feelings, and intuitions—that people invest in their surroundings.
The Emotional Tapestry of Urban Spaces reveals cities as landscapes, where memory, identity, trauma, and feeling converge beyond or despite functional constructs. Each artwork invites viewers to uncover the layers of emotion embedded in the city’s fabric, highlighting the powerful bond between people and place. By elevating these unseen connections, the exhibition urges us to honour the unseen forces that truly bring cities to life.
Jingyao Huang combines geometry, a recurring theme in urban design, with emotive, lyrical impressions, contrasting the rational design of cities with the fluid, subjective experiences of those who inhabit them. Through digital reassemblies, dismantled photographs, paintings, and installations, the exhibition brings fragmented memories into the present, illustrating how ideology and memory shape our interactions with urban spaces.
Sève Favre maps the “emotional cartography” of a city, exploring how topography and memory intertwine. In her works -exploring her own memories and experiences or during participatory project- created from a city’s topographical data, historical records, and photography, she invites attendees to share personal experiences tied to urban spaces. Here, urban paths become conduits for emotional memory, turning the city into a labyrinth of collective and individual recollections. The act of projection—both as cartographic practice and psychological process—demonstrates how we continuously infuse our environments with meaning.
Henrik Langsdorf explores the “post-architectural” stage of urban life, where structures are no longer inhabited according to their original design. Through collage and video, he imagines architecture in new contexts, blending it with organic forms to evoke living, breathing organisms that grow organically rather than through rigid planning. Humans, often marginalized, appear resilient against disenfranchisement, while decaying architecture gains a malleable, life-like quality which doesn’t exist in the reality of urban dwellings and their structural requirements.
Artists Biographies
In her practice, Sève Favre concentrates on transcending the classical boundary between the artwork and the viewer. The main feature of her art is interactivity. The keywords that support her concept is being in interaction (be together), variation (be different), activity (be active). She wants to integrate the viewer into her art in a direct and tactile way. Sève Favre combines this experience through works on canvas, installations, happening or digital projects. Her interactive artworks engage the public in the artistic process in order to have an impact on their way of thinking about art and concepts. Her aim is to generate a flow of experiences, interactions and relationships with the public that is multimedia.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including among others Centro de Arte UNLP, (Argentina), At The OFFSpace (Switzerland), Bienalsur 2021 (Saudi Arabia and Argentina), Filippo Contemporary/Galeria Nueva (Spain), Atopos at SPARC Venezia (Italy), CICA Museum (South Korea), Larnaca Biennale (Zyprus), Fondation WRP (Switzerland)… She has taken part in international art residencies such as at La Paternal Espacio Proyecto (Argentina), Domaine de Boisbuchet (France), Pedvale Art Park and Museum (Latvia), Rimbun Dahan (Malaysia), Studio at MASS MoCA (USA) and Vermont Studio Center (USA), Hello New York by CPR (USA). She was a finalist for the 14th Arte Laguna Prize in the installation and sculpture section. In 2022, she was co-recipient of the “Art en partage/Etat du Valais” grant to develop access to contemporary art in retirement homes (Switzerland). She was also longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2024 and this year, she will take part at VCCA Residency (USA). Sève Favre mostly lives and works in Lausanne, Switzerland.
@sevefavre www.sevefavre.com
Jingyao Huang is a photographic installation artist currently based in New York, USA, and Guangzhou, China. Her artistic practice centers around photography and extends to collage, installation, and site-specific projects. Through a semiotic analytical perspective, she redefines and reconstructs everyday photographic works to explore the significance of time and memory within lived spaces. By materializing fragments of present memories from conscious space into physical space, she examines the meaning and value of personal identity while responding to the echoes of environmental changes. Her work reflects an acute awareness of contemporary surroundings and conveys her creative perspective through various media.
Jingyao Huang’s work has been recognized with the School of Visual Arts Alumni Award and has been exhibited at prominent venues, including Rooftop Art Center, China (2024), TheBlanc Space, New York (2024), Scholart Foundation, Los Angeles (2024), Latitude Gallery, New York (2023), Chambers Fine Art, New York (2023), Ki Smith Gallery, New York (2023), 2522 House Studio, China (2022). Her works are held in the collections of international institutions and private collectors, including TheBlanc Art Space, New York, Zhu Zai Ji Restaurant, Guangzhou, and the Foshan Four Seasons Art Collective, Guangzhou. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Photography and Video and a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York.
@jingyao_huang www.jingyaohuang.com
Henrik Langsdorf is a multidisciplinary artist whose work ranges from abstract art and collage to time-based media and art in public space. Informed and inspired by time spent in Kinshasa, DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo), the body of work presented in this show is part of an ongoing exploration of the dystopian counterpart of architectural utopia as it manifests itself in a lived urban reality. By merging organic and architectural forms in imagined spaces, Langsdorf looks at how life unfolds outside the framework created by architects and urban planners. In another part of his practice, which also originates from time spent in Africa, Langsdorf investigates the nexus between colonial history and racism in the African diaspora in his native Germany.
Henrik Langsdorf’s work has been exhibited internationally. Selected shows include the Congo Biennale, ruruhaus (a space run by documenta fifteen), MARKK Museum Hamburg, Kassel Architektur Zentrum (KAZ), Galleria Kollektiva and Hugenottenhaus (both in partnership with documenta 15) in Kassel, Germany, Arsenale Nord, Venice and Doual’Art, Douala, Cameroon. His video installation “Rudolf Duala Manga Bell – a German Story” has won awards at international film festivals, including Best Experimental Film, Rome Prisma Film Awards, Winner/Artist Film, Berlin Indie Film Festival, Best Experimental Short, London Independent Film Awards, Official Selection, Florence Film Awards, Italy and Finalist at New York International Film Awards. He was also a finalist for the 16th Arte Laguna Prize and a winner at ArtNova 100 in Beijing. In 2021 he founded Blind Spots in the Sun, an initiative addressing colonial history and racism in Germany through art interventions. In 2023, he was an artist-in-residence at the Curatorial Program for Research in New York. Langsdorf’s work is held in private collections in the United States, Germany and Switzerland. A graduate from HAW Hamburg’s Faculty of Design, Media & Information, Langsdorf divides his time between New York and Kassel, Germany.
@henriklangsdorf www.henriklangsdorf.com
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Free Public Events
Seve Favre: Artist Talk and Workshop: “Emotional Mapping”
Based on the wheel of emotions, “Emotional mapping” allows participants to become aware of how they feel when they move around a neighbourhood: favourite paths, avoided roads, places that make people happy, places of collective or individual history, geographical points of bad memories….
Friday February 7, 6-8pm
Saturday February 8, 2-4pm
Henrik Langsdorf: Artist talk “Ville Fantôme: from Utopia to the present”
Langsdorf discusses how the unique architectural vision of the late Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez inspired him to imagine the colorful cityscapes of “Ville Fantôme” after decades of war and tropical climate and how people of present-day Kinshasa would live in them.
Sunday February 16 at 3pm [date pending response from curator]
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Sève Favre met Henrik Langsdorf during the artistic residency ‘ ‘Hello New York by CPR’’ in 2023 and Jingyao Huang during the residency at Vermont Studio Center in 2024. “The Emotional Tapestry of Urban Spaces” is their first exhibition together. Special Thanks to Kaleb Wise, the PS122 Advisory Board, and Nancy Paredes for helping to make this show happen!