Art Out: Aperture Gallery's Summer Open: Delirious Cities

Photography by Andrés Mercado

The city is an ever-changing landscape, a place of contested freedom, a laboratory of identity, a supermarket of desires. When the architect Rem Koolhaas first published his 1978 manifesto, Delirious New York, he wrote of density and ecstasy, of the epic visions of Manhattan skyscrapers and the otherworldliness of capitalist congestion. Through their photographs, videos, and lens-based installations, the twenty-three artists selected for the 2019 Aperture Summer Open propel Koolhaas’s curiosity into the present, defining the contours of metropolitan life in the twenty-first century—from the parks of Washington Heights to the bustling blocks of Luanda, Angola. They question the role of surveillance in Brussels, portray the opulent voguing scene in Amsterdam, saunter along the sidewalks of Istanbul, confront the specter of gun violence in Miami, and chronicle the dreams of Mumbai. Some apply bold colors to archival images, while others work beyond the city’s outskirts, in imaginative studios or mysterious environments. Together, they offer urgent statements about how images are shaping the contemporary city as an endless project, a delirious machine for living.

The Summer Open is curated by Brendan Embser, managing editor, Aperture magazine; Matthew Leifheit, artist and editor of MATTE magazine; Chiara Bardelli Nonino, photo editor, Vogue Italia and L’Uomo Vogue; Azu Nwagbogu, director of African Artists’ Foundation and LagosPhoto; and Guadalupe Rosales, artist and founder of Veteranas & Rucas and Map Pointz.

To find out more about Delirious Cities, visit Aperture’s website here