During the past four decades Acconci's innovative work and ideas have been in the vanguard of contemporary artistic practice in poetry, performance, film, video, installation, public sculpture, and architecture. The Icar exhibition shows how Acconci's architectural designs have emerged organically from his ideas of language, body,

 Project for Garbage City, 
Hiriya, Israel, 1999

and space: "no longer games of making spaces, building spaces; they [became] spaces to be in now."  The exhibition highlights Acconci's proactive approach to the notion of "being in the space" by presenting the works in the Icar-Paris exhibition space built in accordance with similar principles. 

Acconci first became known for his radical thinking as a writer and performance artist. In 1988 he said, "Going into the street was a way of literally breaking the margins, breaking out of the house and leaving the paper behind." Many of his 1970s performance, video and installation works already bear his signature blurring of boundaries between artist and viewer. Among the most striking of these works is Acconci's seemingly self-centered, sexually explicit performance piece Seedbed (1972), with its environment reconfigured as a new space or "power field" where the spectator was creating the artist's fantasies. 

What Acconci calls "widening [of the] focus onto passing viewers" and "holding a camera, aimed away from me" define his concept of architecture. Thus the "self-erecting architectures" of the late 1970s involved the viewer as an important structural element of the work. Several works from 1981, including Machine for Living, Community House, Peeling House, and Fan City, as well as Portable Cities from 1982 expressed Acconci's idea of a community and contributed to the contemporary artistic debates concerning the politics and economy of the city. 

In 1988, following the exhibition "Public Places" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Acconci began to focus almost exclusively on permanent public commissions. The ICAR exhibition includes models for major public proposals from the team at the Acconci Studio, including three built projects: the Loloma Transportation Center (Scottsdale, Arizona, U.S.A., 1993), Park in the Water (The Hague, Netherlands, 1997), and the Munich Buildings Department (Munich, Germany, 1997), and other designs from the 1988-2000 period. While Acconci's architectural work shares its political consciousness with his other work, it is less determined by the ideology of confrontation with pictorial, linguistic and other conventions. Each piece reinterprets, radically and playfully, the everyday reality of a given site. A person not only plays an essential role in determining how to use the space, but transforms it by "being in it." The reconfigured space is to be enjoyed as both a private space and public space, where one is always or, as Jacques Derrida would have it, always already "within the company of other people."