Pavement
Pavement is a new exhibition space housed in a former drapery store. The window space, which cannot be entered by the public, provides a highly visible stage for the display of international contemporary art. Any threshold existing between the institution and the outside world is absent; the work can be seen by the public, day and night. A distant glance engages the viewer and the work invites their scrutiny. Pavement will allow for the exploration of potential differences in the relationship of contemporary art to an unconventional institutional setting. The work on display will seek to utilise and exploit its position of visibility in order for its significance to be explored and to generate a wider response.
Silent Post
Marita Fraser, Matthew Higgs, Emilie Pitoiset and Chu Yun
2nd July - 13th August 2009
Silent Post is a group exhibition that explores themes of appropriation, value temporality and distance. The title of the exhibition is one of numerous names to describe the game of 'successive whispers', where a phrase is passed from one person to another. In the course of its journey, meaning is gradually altered as each player becomes author of their own version.
Silent Post considers the actual conditions in which contemporary art is both anchored and perpetuated. The artistic act of reproduction has a synchronic duality: it permits the original to survive, but it also entails its death.
The intention of this exhibition is to reveal and highlight the artistic and curatorial procedure involved in the adaptation of past works as well as the implications in displaying reproducible art pieces.
To support this visual assembly of translation a symposium will question how the appropriation of image and text might affect the audience, in terms of the meaning, the potential value of the work and its relationship to context.
Chu Yun has exhibited internationally and is currently participating in the 53rd Venice Biennale. Unspeakable Happiness (2003) is loaned to the gallery on the premise that the work is temporal, it must be destroyed and this destruction has to be documented.
Marita Fraser combines her own practise with the artist-run initiative bell street project space in Vienna. In 50 works I have never seen (2007), Fraser reproduces, in a slide format, images taken from art catalogues showing works that existed in temporary form or rarely seen archives.
Matthew Higgs is an internationally renowned curator and director of the independent art space White Columns. The origin of Artists Say the Silliest Things (2008) lies in the language of an existing book that Higgs extracted, isolated and re-presented.
Emilie Pitoiset has participated in several international exhibitions and festivals. In Damage (2006), language itself becomes the subject of investigation, through a simple re-ordering of letters the words become distorted and yet meaning still remains.
