ARCHITECTURES OF MEMORY
TRACING THE URBAN SOUL
5 – 22 MARCH 2026
This show brings together four artists who utilize the language of architecture to explore the complex layers of human history, social structures, and collective identity. Though their methods vary, a common thread unites them: the investigation of the urban landscape as a symbolic space that reveals the “invisible” truths of our society.
A striking commonality among these artists is their focus on the poetics of space and the traces of human presence. Gabriele Basilico (1944-2013) and Seher Shah (b. 1975) both navigate the concepts of absence and fragmentation. Basilico’s “scant” black and white photography of “ghost cities” like Beirut captures the “soul” of devastated urban centers, attempting to photograph the “invisible” through the visible. Similarly, Shah explores “states of absence” and “fractured histories,” using her architectural background to mark the traces of time through real and imagined spaces.
“For me, photographing means taking samples from the real world and metabolizing them, like a necessary and nourishing substance for memory, and I am convinced that I have a bulimic relationship with reality. I take a great many photographs even though, since I mostly use a tripod and a large-format camera, I manage to control myself and not get too carried away by the almost compulsive rapidity that is always lurking, and to maintain a slow and measured pace.” ― Gabriele Basilico, Architetture, Città, Visioni: Riflessioni Sulla Fotografia
In a parallel dialogue, Carlos Garaicoa (b. 1967) and Kuba Bakowski (b. 1971) examine how specific sites reflect social structures and human labor. From Havana, Garaicoa critiques “modernist Utopian architecture” and the collapse of 20th-century ideologies, viewing the city as a symbolic space of irony and hopelessness. This transformative approach is echoed in the work of Kuba Bakowski, who turns the harsh interior of a European coal mine into a conceptual stage. By having miners pose so their headlights form the Ursa Major constellation, Bakowski elevates the industrial reality into a luminous, celestial image, bridging the gap between the terrestrial and the cosmic.
The buildings and settings that we find in these photographs are “portraits” of our social evolution and the silent witnesses to the devastation of war and the shifts of political power.
Ultimately, these artists demonstrate that while our cultures and locations differ, the constructed landscape remains a universal archive. Whether in the ruins of Beirut, or the depths of a coal mine, they reveal that man-made spaces embody and preserve our collective memory.
