Counter Cartographies – 2024 Graduate Fellow Exhibition
901 Minnesota St, San Francisco, CA 94107
HOURS
Wed, Thurs, Fri : 12 – 5pm
Sat + Sun: 10am – 5pm
CLOSED MONDAYS, TUESDAYS, AND PUBLIC HOLIDAYS.
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the function of mapping is less to mirror reality than to
engender the re-shaping of the worlds in which people live.
…
As a creative practice, mapping precipitates its most productive effects
through a finding that is also a founding; its agency lies in neither reproduction
nor imposition but rather in uncovering realities previously
unseen or unimagined, even across seemingly exhausted grounds. Thus,
mapping unfolds potential; it re-makes territory over and over again, each
time with new and diverse consequences.[1]
James Corner
landscape architect
James Corner’s theory of mapping highlights the cartographic sensibility can be traced throughout the work of the 2024 Headlands’ Graduate Fellow cohort. This exhibition offers up the urban fabric in haunting and delightfully unfamiliar ways. As mappings, the artists’ work defies understandings of the city that would flatten its complexity or sidestep critique. As James Corner notes, cartographies are powerful because they open us up to new ways of thinking with places we think we know. This exhibition of counter cartographies resists ideological representations of the Bay Area as either a crop of data to harvest or an exploited wasteland. Instead, we are invited to be more present to a flux of “previously unseen or unimagined” realities.
Curated by Christian Gonzalez Ho
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[1] Corner, James. 1999. “The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention.” In Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove, 213-252. London: Reaktion Books.
