What a pity you are an architect. You would make a sensational partner.

The title is a sentence Josefin Baker apparently once said to Adolf Loos.

The work consists of a bedroom, scaled to the size of the institutes and residencies that invited Dewar over the course of a year.

The space hosts elements that were designed by Adolf Loos for a house he drew for Josefin Baker – which she refused to see built.

In the space, we see Dewar dance Baker’s famous steps, and then those of her own body, dressed only in buttered, blackened skin. Watching her body move freely in the gigantic white spaces of today’s contemporary art spaces is at once captivating and disconcerting.

“What a pity you are an architect. You would make a sensational partner.” is a work by the 2013 Fondation Ricard winner Lily Reynaud Dewar (1975, FR).