‘Hard Engineering: Propositions for Future Ruins’ – Exhibition in Lisbon curated by and featuring Julie Westerman’s work

Immaterial structures and material products are invariably subject to physical decay and social decline – no matter how grandiose or technologically advanced they might be. This exhibition explores sites of urban development and transformation to consider how we navigate and repurpose the future ruins of our urban surroundings.

Hard Engineering – Propositions for Future Ruins is an exhibition curated by and featuring the work of Julie Westerman, senior lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University.

Hard Engineering – Propositions for Future Ruins
Old Riding Hall, Colégio dos Nobres
National Museum of Natural History and Science, Lisbon
Rua da Escola Politécnica, 56/58 . 1250-102 Lisboa
Friday 29 September to Friday 05 November 2017
See here for further information.

Increasingly produced and experienced outside the gallery, art often takes the form of interventions in public spaces to create critical responses and insights into urban change. These practices explore how the urban environment is produced by everyday acts and how the city is constructed from material and immaterial structures of civic organisation, representation, power and control. Hard Engineering addresses these issues with critical cartographies that explore how we think about navigating the city. These take the form of maps, charts and urban guides, films, sound works and installation that assess how counter-narratives, contested histories and marginalised memories can be revived and redeployed within a range of urban contexts undergoing rapid transformation.

The exhibition is curated by Jaspar Joseph Lester, Julie Westerman and Susanne Prinze.

Julie Westerman is a senior lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, working across sculpture, drawing, film, animation, and as a curator.