Contribution and collaboration: the work of Petra Andrejova-Molnár and her contemporaries

In her first artist book, Katarina Burin creates a fictitious Czechoslovakian architect named Andrejova-Molnar, described as a pioneering architect of modern postwar Europe, as part of her investigation of architectural history. It is a biographical narrative about the education and design work of Andrejova-Molnar, and positions her work in relation to mid-20th-century female architects Charlotte Perriand and Eileen Grey. Burin’s Andrejova-Molnar project, which won the prestigious James and Audrey Foster Prize at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 2013, gives voice to female designers while questioning notions of authorship and authenticity, the relationship between gender and the archive, and the historical tension between national identity and internationalist aspirations.