NEW YORK, NY.- PS122 Gallery is presenting The Emotional Tapestry of Urban Spaces, featuring Sève Favre, Henrik Langsdorf, and Jingyao Huang. Urban planning generally prioritizes strict rationality and function over human experience. As a result, it often dismisses the crucial role emotions play in how we live, remember, and connect with spaces. This exhibition seeks to challenge this standard by elevating the overlooked effects—emotions, feelings, and intuitions—that people invest in their surroundings.

The Emotional Tapestry of Urban Spaces reveals cities as landscapes, where memory, identity, trauma, and feeling converge beyond or despite functional constructs. Each artwork invites viewers to uncover the layers of emotion embedded in the city's fabric, highlighting the powerful bond between people and place. By elevating these unseen connections, the exhibition urges us to honor the unseen forces that truly bring cities to life.

Sève Favre maps the "emotional cartography" of a city, exploring how topography and memory intertwine. In her works – exploring her own memories and experiences or during a participatory project – created from a city’s topographical data, historical records, and photography, she invites attendees to share personal experiences tied to urban spaces. Here, urban paths become conduits for emotional memory, turning the city into a labyrinth of collective and individual recollections. Selected shows and residencies include Bienalsur (Saudi Arabia and Argentina), CICA Museum (South Korea), Fondation WRP (Switzerland), and MASS MoCA (USA). @sevefavre | www.sevefavre.com


Henrik Langsdorf, Placid Precarity, left, and Caryatid Congolaises, right, both archival pigment print and 2023.

Henrik Langsdorf explores the “post-architectural” stage of urban life, where structures are no longer inhabited according to their original design. Through collage and video, he imagines architecture in new contexts, blending it with organic forms to evoke living, breathing organisms that grow organically rather than through rigid planning. Humans, often marginalized, appear resilient against disenfranchisement, while decaying architecture gains a malleable, life-like quality which doesn’t exist in the reality of urban dwellings and their structural requirements. Langsdorf has shown at ruruhaus (documenta fifteen), Congo Biennale, Arsenale Nord, Venice and MARKK Museum in Hamburg. @henriklangsdorf | www.henriklangsdorf.com

Jingyao Huang combines geometry, a recurring theme in urban design, with emotive, lyrical impressions, contrasting the rational design of cities with the fluid, subjective experiences of those who inhabit them. Through digital reassemblies, dismantled photographs, paintings, and installations, the exhibition brings fragmented memories into the present, illustrating how ideology and memory shape our interactions with urban spaces. Selected shows include The Blanc Space, New York, Scholart Foundation, Los Angeles, Latitude Gallery, New York and Ki Smith Gallery, New York
@jingyao_huang | www.jingyaohuang.com

Artist's Talks

“Ville Fantôme: from Utopia to the Present”; Sunday, February 23rd 3pm, followed by closing reception 4 - 6pm

Henrik Langsdorf discusses how the late Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez’s distinctive architectural vision inspired him to imagine Kingelez’s vibrant utopian cityscapes as if they had been constructed, exploring how they might age over decades and how ordinary people might inhabit them.

Seve Favre: Artist Talk and Workshop: “Emotional Mapping”; Feb. 7, 6 - 8pm & Feb. 8, 2 - 4pm

Based on the wheel of emotions, “Emotional mapping” allows participants to become aware of how they feel when they move around a neighborhood: favorite paths, avoided roads, places that make people happy, places of collective or individual history, and geographical points of bad memories.