In celebration of EXPO’s South Side Night, the Arts + Public Life gallery will offer extended hours on April 7. Guests are invited to explore the exhibition and enjoy a light reception with refreshments and good company throughout the evening.

About the Exhibition

Sightlines, Ghosts, and Other Stories of the Impossible by Jess Atieno

This exhibition considers the shifting legacy of African modernism through the afterlives of independence-era architecture. Once positioned as markers of a newly imagined modern Africa, many Brutalist and modernist structures now exist in states of weathering and transformation, revealing modernism as unstable, incomplete, and continually renegotiated. Rather than signaling failure, these conditions point to modernism as an ongoing and unresolved project shaped by political promise. In dialogue with Black diasporic histories across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, the work engages water, sound, and circulation as spatial forces that complicate architectural permanence.