Scottish-Ghanaian architecture academic, educator and novelist Lesley Lokko will curate the 18th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale, to be held in 2023.
The board of the biennale met on 14 December and appointed Lokko “upon the recommendation of president Roberto Cicutto.”
Lokko has taught architecture in the UK, in the US, Europe, Australia and Africa and is the recipient of a number of awards for architectural education, including the RIBA Annie Spink Award for Excellence in Education (2020) and the AR Ada Louise Huxtable Prize for Contributions to Architecture (2021). She was a speaker at the Australian Institute of Architects’ 2019 National Architecture Conference.
Lokko is the founder and director of the African Futures Institute, established in Accra, Ghana, in 2020 as a postgraduate school of architecture and public events platform, and in 2015 she founded the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg.
Her work in both architecture and literature over 30 years has looked at the relationship between race, culture, and space. She will become the first black architect to curate the architecture exhibition in Venice.
“A new world order is emerging, with new centres of knowledge production and control”, Lokko said. “New audiences are also emerging, hungry for different narratives, different tools and different languages of space, form, and place. After two of the most difficult and divisive years in living memory, architects have a unique opportunity to show the world what we do best: put forward ambitious and creative ideas that help us imagine a more equitable and optimistic future in common.”
Roberto Cicutto said, “The appointment of Lesley Lokko as curator of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition is a way of welcoming the gaze of an international personality who is able to interpret, through different roles, her own position in the contemporary debate on architecture and cities, which takes as its starting point her own experience immersed in a continent that is increasingly becoming a laboratory of experimentation and proposals for the whole contemporary world. I believe that this immersion in reality is the best way to dialogue with the questions raised by the 2021 Exhibition curated by Hashim Sarkis.”
