Join
the curators and artists for one or several public programs:
Friday, November 9, 6:30 pm
Artist Talk with Lars Vilks at apexart
Sunday, November 11, 1:00 pm
Visit to Benchmark with John Hawke
departure from apexart
The artist gives an on-site talk about his intervention in
a bus shelter in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn
Thursday, November 29, 2-6 pm
"Strategies of Occupation: Grabbing Land and The Political
Agency of The Artist"
Join the curators for a Public Workshop at Vera
List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, New
York: 66 West 12th Street, #510
Friday, November 30, 6:30 pm
Artist Talk with Jens Haaning and Amy Balkin at apexart
Landgrabonline.org
An online counterpart to the exhibition, the Web site features
a selection of works drawn from submissions by artists working
within the domain of claiming land. Landgrabonline.org is
created in collaboration with the participatory art platform
Wooloo.org.
As real estate prices have skyrocketed throughout cities
of the world, it has become increasingly difficult to sustain
a place. Some artists' responses to this situation mirror
those of many practitioners in the sixties and seventies who
moved to the margins to seek out an abandoned or still undeveloped
site to live and work on an expanded scale. By contrast, no
piece in LAND GRAB has involved a real estate transaction
or finding that prime location. Instead, the show brings together
a range of actions, including semiotic redesignation, under-the-radar
alteration, parasitical squatting, dissident occupation and
fantasized ownership. Every exhibited practice draws attention
to the specificities of the relationship between art and the
ground on which it is conceived and perceived. As the works
reveal, this is by no means an imminent relation of groundedness;
the pieces do not simply belong. Although each piece is transposed
on a specific place, this relation is often one that is characterized
more by contradiction and conflict than by a "natural,"
and nostalgic, sense of home. Each affiliation of artwork
to site (figure to ground) is not just a matter of object
placement. The pieces all implicitly question the connection
of the human subject to a specific location, in turn demonstrating
that there are no "objective" places, only relationships
to them. Produced under an enduring condition of an inflated
real estate market, disappearing affordable housing, increasing
mobility and forced displacement, as well as a global homogenization
of built space, the pieces all exhibit an urgency of maintaining
a position and space from which to live and work. However,
as the artworks suggest, claiming a place of one's own does
not solve the problem of modern (and spatial) alienation.
Every act of taking inevitably involves the displacement of
something/someone else, and that piece of ground will never
cease to conjure specters of past inhabitations.
Lillian Fellmann is a curator and
culture critic. Sarah Lookofsky is a critic and curator living
in New York.
This exhibition is supported in part
by the Nordic Culture Fund and the Danish Arts Council.
apexart’s exhibitions and public
programs are supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation
for the Visual Arts, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Foundation
for Contemporary Arts, and with public funds from the New
York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State
Council on the Arts. |
