DOKU.ARTS
Zeughauskino Berlin
09.09.–27.09.2015

David Adjaye – Collaborations. A Portrait of the Architect through the Eyes of Others

The buildings by the British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye are characterised by the idea of dialogue: they seek a connection to place, to social context, to people. The film David Adjaye – Collaborations, commissioned by the Munich Haus der Kunst, also searches for dialogue. It spotlights Adjaye’s buildings and illuminates his working methods, in the form of interviews with curators, artists and friends.

Some of Adjaye’s best-known projects include public buildings such as the Stephen Lawrence Centre in London, residential buildings such as the Sugar Hill Development in Harlem, and museums like the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, which is still under construction. Other buildings arose in collaboration with artist friends, such as The Dirty House for Tim and Sue Webster in London’s East End, and Lorna Simpson’s studio Pitch Black in Brooklyn, New York. For artists who commissioned them as well as for the architect himself, these buildings were milestones and engines of their careers.

Those interviewed include the curators of the Adjaye exhibition at the Haus der Kunst, Okwui Enwezor and Zoë Ryan, architecture critic Deyan Sudjic, curator Thelma Golden, writer Taiye Selasi, and artists Julie Mehretu and Chris Ofili.