Exhibiting for the first time in Ho Chi Minh City, Hong Kong-based Laurent Gutierrez and Valerie Portefaix, of MAP Office are presenting 20 years of reflection on territories. Islands, Archipelagos and Other Liquid Territories is an unfolding of their navigations and long time reading of unstable global geographies. A series of maps and cartographies of selected past and recent projects have produced an atlas where the role of the conventional disciplinary architectural and artistic practice is challenged to explore new territories in a more narrative and fictional form of knowledge production. The work on display at the gallery starts from Hong Kong and moves on to the subject of islands. The predominance of the color blue reinforce the saturation of the atmospheric condition as a way to question the anthropocene and the impact of human beings on ecosystems.
MAP Office is a multidisciplinary platform devised by Laurent Gutierrez (1966, Casablanca, Morocco) and Valérie Portefaix (1969, Saint-Étienne, France). This duo of artist/architect has been based in Hong Kong since 1996, working on physical and imaginary territories using varied means of expression. MAP Office projects have been exposed in over 100 exhibitions at prestigious venues including the MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Georges Pompidou Centre (Paris) and the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (Beijing), around 30 Biennales and Triennales around the world with five contributions to the Venice Biennale in Art and Architecture (2000, 2003, 2007, 2008, 2010). Their cross-disciplinary practice has been the subject of a monograph, MAP OFFICE – Where the Map is the Territory (2011). MAP Office was the recipient of the 2013 edition of the Sovereign Asian Art Prize.
Location: 103 Dong Khoi, Dist.1, Ho Chi Minh City
