Creative Dialogue

Architect David Adjaye has joined forces with artist Adam Pendleton for an unusual exhibition at Pace in Hong Kong. Before it opens this month, the pair discuss blurring boundaries and “activating society”

- Becky Sunshine

“An artist’s process and an architect’s process are completely different, but the end game is fascinatingly close,” says award-winning British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye over a crackly phone line from Accra, Ghana. That end game has been on Adjaye’s mind recently because he’s working on a new collaborative project with African-American artist Adam Pendleton, his close friend, that will be on show at Pace in Hong Kong from May 18 until June 30.

The exhibition features a body of new paintings by Pendleton alongside three new pyramidal sculptures from Adjaye’s on-going Monoform series, which blurs the boundaries between sculpture and design. The day we speak is Martin Luther King Day in the US, which turns out to be of notable significance to the artists: Adjaye and Pendleton first collaborated on an ambitious architectural proposal for the Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King Memorial in Boston, Massachusetts in 2017. It was ultimately unsuccessful, but the project ignited a deeper dialogue between the pair, who both explore—and champion—black culture and history in their work.

“I love art for art’s sake, but I also love when art is able to be a socially transformative way forward,” says Adjaye. “There are a lot of practices now that are not just about making things on a canvas but activating society.”