Air Aggregation

<p>This next-to-last issue of <em>Taming the Horror Vacui</em>, titled <em>Air Aggregation</em>, brings together artworks and air. Haseeb Ahmed’s art installation at Rib and the wind tunnel at its center have been used for experiments and workshops throughout the entire long-term artist’s program. Expanding on this approach, this publication collects annotated images of artworks brought to Rib by Piero Bisello to be tested in Ahmed’s wind tunnel in June 2021.</p> <p>If wind and air are the mediums of choice in Ahmed’s art, the aggregation of different practices can be seen as his modus operandi. The outlook of Rib as an institution hosting artists’ long term programs along with exhibitions has proven especially suitable for this aspect of Ahmed’s approach to art-making. Rib’s context has allowed the generation of content and to forge new relations, deepening existing ones and including the local by the embedding of an artistic practice in the context of the hosting institution and its city—in this case the Charlois neighborhood of Rotterdam.</p> <p>Over 1.5 years, Ahmed’s program <em>Taming the Horror Vacui</em> and Rib have created the opportunity to present the contribution of other artists, as well as practitioners from fields such as science, engineering, education, art history, architecture, urbanism, and more. The accompanying publication has been the mirror of this process of aggregation, complementing each major event in the program with a new issue that followed a system of image annotation by invited contributors…</p>