Exhibition: Zenovia Toloudi

Zenovia Toloudi will give a public lecture on her exhibit Technoutopias on Tuesday, September 24th, 2019 at 4:45 pm in the Loew Auditorium. The exhibit will run from September 24 - November 17, 2019 in the Jaffe-Friede Gallery and Strauss Gallery.

Zenovia Toloudi's exhibit, Technoutopias, explores architecture's ability to animate the social imaginary and trigger the extinct civic self. The work critiques our alienation from nature and each other and strives to restore broken relationships. At a moment of extreme cultural and ecological anxiety, we're retreating from engagement, shrinking our world to the handheld sphere of our devices. It's the intent of Technoutopias to challenge this retreat and investigate how architecture, thoughtfully shaped, offers a medium through which to find the right size for tech and an exemplary space for what it means to be a public and publicly-motivated human. Intimate, historically-inflected, openly discontented and bracingly optimistic, Technoutopias' pieces invite us to remember we are makers of and participants in the creations we experience as home. And that if we do not remember our better selves, we may not be able to house what's left of what's most important. Technoutopias shares a series of possibilities for who we want and may need to become. It steers us toward a new civic vocabulary and fresh chances to establish rituals building empathy, courage, and connection. Moving fluidly between spaces, with an ease mirroring the malleability of the spirit we need to develop, Technoutopias helps us rediscover and activate a public and truly public-spirited self.

Zenovia Toloudi, D.Des, is an architect, artist and Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Dartmouth College. Zenovia makes art to realize imaginative architectures that generate inclusion through digital and organic media and experiment with subjective perception of space and engagement. Her work, poised at the intersection of art and architecture, critiques the alienation of humans from nature and each other and strives to restore broken relationships. Zenovia has exhibited at the Biennale in Venice, the Center for Architecture in New York, the Athens Byzantine Museum, Le Lieu Unique in Nantes, and the Onassis Cultural Center in Athens. She has won commissions from Illuminus Boston, and The Lab at Harvard. Her work belongs to permanent collections at Aristotle University and the Thracian Pinacotheca. Zenovia has been invited to lecture on topics of spatial light, art installations, and bioarchitecture at venues such as the Light InSight, an interdisciplinary series of lectures at the New England College of Optometry, the International Symposium for Electronic Arts, the MIT Media Lab, the MIT Museum, the Aga Khan Symposium, the AIAS Forum, and the International Making Cities Livable Conference. In addition, she has published on bioart, immaterial architecture, and the public sphere in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture, Technoetic Arts Journal of Speculative Research, and MAS Context's issue on the Ordinary. A Research Fellow at Art, Culture, and Technology Program at MIT, recipient of The Class of 1962 Fellowship, a Public Voices Fellow and a Fulbright Fellow, Zenovia received her doctorate from Harvard's GSD, a M.Arch. from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and a diploma in Architectural Engineering from Aristotle University. Raised at a periphery of Greece, Zenovia works in the Mediterranean and in North America and her fascination with borders is reflected in art that ranges in reference and material across the boundaries of biology and technology.