David Adjaye’s Making Memory is the architect’s second major exhibition at London’s Design Museum. The first was almost a decade ago—shortly after he landed the career-defining commission to build the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC—and Urban Africa (2010) showed the fruits of his self-initiated mission to photograph every African capital city. The current show, presenting seven of Adjaye’s projects as a means to explore the role of contemporary monuments and memorials, is bigger and materially richer, but was born of the same concerns.
Adjaye chose to study Africa to uncover the ways that power has buried knowledge of other cultures, with a resultant loss of visibility and esteem. “I deeply desire a world in which knowledge is above power,” he says. Now, as an architect with major public commissions, dealing with sensitive sites and subjects, he questions the use of architectural objects to shape or articulate collective memory. Conventional obelisks and triumphal arches—such as those depicted at the start of the exhibition—belong to an age in which official history was not to be questioned, values were assumed to be universal, and memorials demanded a prescribed, ritualized form of observance from visitors. How might monuments be “democratized” for a more egalitarian age, in which a greater plurality of voices expects to be heard, and “a new generation re-evaluates the legacy of colonial and other histories,” asks the architect?
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