The Exhibition of a Necessary Incompleteness is a photo- and text-based investigation into articulations of deliberate incompleteness and indeterminacy in the built landscape. Little attention has been given to the cultural, social, political, technological, environmental, and aesthetic significance behind present–day residential projects that favor long–term building techniques which deliberately prolong the construction process by many years, even generations. Focusing on structures characterized by a fully occupied and maintained ground floor juxtaposed against cinder blocks and rebar protruding from exposed columns on the top floor, this investigation engages with a building typology largely overlooked within architectural discourse. Through a combination of photographs, discursive and theoretical texts, self–organized seminars and exhibitions at an international free school, and a project in a journal for contemporary culture, art, and politics, this investigation is characterized by an interdisciplinary line of inquiry engaging with the constitutive meanings behind this complex and sometimes contradictory practice in perpetuity.

Joseph Redwood-Martinez is an artist and writer from the United States. His writing has appeared in Frieze, Modern Painters, and the Contemporary Art + Visual Culture Broadsheet, and he is a contributing editor to Ment. A book of his recent writing, event statements, was published in April 2011 by Publication Studio. He has shown work and curated programs in Sweden, Germany, Turkey, the UK, and the United States. In 2011–2012, he developed a research program titled One day, everything will be free... while he was a curatorial fellow at SALT in Istanbul.