CURATICISM |The Gam #3
Spoken Words Exhibition: Panel Discussion
June 13th @ 3pm
June 13th @ 3pm
New York Art Residency & Studios (NARS) Foundation is delighted to present CURATICISM |The Gam #3, a Spoken Words Exhibition curated by Alessandro Facente with artists Magali Duzant (USA), Katrina Neumann (USA), Yvonne C Roth (Germany), Knutte Wester (Sweden), and curator Tina Kukielski (New York) about the concept of displacement as intersection.
The GAM #3 introduces the work of four artists whose practice merges, connects, expands, contracts and integrates itself with daily life and the external world as a whole, by working along with common people, small and large communities, as well as producing do-it- yourself-art within natural and urban landscapes and during natural phenomena.
Yvonne C Roth's work deals with light refractions, unconventional forms and reflecting materials, as well as ephemeral sculptures and do-it-yourself public interventions that are filmed on video. These encourage the viewer toward concepts such as immateriality and self- investigation. This in-depth-analysis of human introspection form an internal and almost spiritual stand point. In Knutte Wester’s work it becomes, instead, external, i.e. more devoted to people and the public scenario in general. His work focuses on long term community- based projects where the artist, in particular, plays a crucial role in the life of children in orphanages and refugee camps, re-discussing the artist’s role within society and its social and humanitarian issues.
Different from Yvonne C Roth and Knutte Wester’s landscapes which are more human, the ones detected by the New York based artists Katrina Neumann and Magali Duzant refer specifically to natural phenomena, such as sunrise and sunset. Magali Duzant utilizes technology to examine temporal experiences and considers the separation between the real and the virtual in such a way as to reunite them in the visual experience of the work of art. In the project, Golden Hour(s): Live Streaming Sunset, she tracks a setting sun in real time, from time zone to time zone, involving people from different geographies. On a more local level and with the constant physical presence of the artist, Katrina Neumann’s series of Sunrise Tours consist of small groups of two to three people, who are invited to enjoy the rising of the sun through a structured and undisclosed itinerary of shared experience. Their objective is to challenge one’s unimpeded perception of reality, by framing a single detail—the sunrise—in order to induce a dislocated condition which forces a shift in our relationship between time and perceived space.
Whatever the case may be, the works of these four artists result as visual dispositives, where different levels of intersection (human, natural, digital, social and psychological) occur in involving people and talking about human existence and the potential of the individual to interconnect with each other to build something bigger. These artists are contributing to the understanding and alternative perceptions of universal concepts such as a sense of curiosity, the inevitability of isolation, sincere attending to each other's needs, coexistence with people and environments, as well as with ourselves as forms of self-aware processes in relation to political, social, environmental, psychological and anthropological issues.
Tina Kukielski is the third curator involved at CURATICISM | The Gam. Her recent curated exhibition Off Pink at the Kitchen in New York proposes concepts about artistic strategies centered on negotiations of personal identity. It makes her curatorial profile a perfect fit for The Gam#3, a Spoken Words Exhibition centered on the connection between the individual and its intersection with the external world. As she writes in her essay published in the Off Pink catalog by The New School, “In an era of widespread, self-consciously public depictions of self –an idea now synonymous with selfie-culture– the personal is becoming more and more challenged. Selfhood is becoming radicalized and fractured, and yet at the same time and in other places, it becomes more and more conventionalized to established standards”.
The GAM is a series of spoken words exhibitions structured in such a way as to ask the artists to dig deep about ways their ideas are born and solidified, putting their experiences, as artists who come from different countries, into words for an audience. The GAM is part of the large-scale project CURATICISM, an ongoing attitude of curating in which the curator’s role is played as observer and witness of the artist’s way of making a piece of art, i.e. from the concept to the final creation, in order to critically outline a philology deeply belonging to its practice. Developed by the curator Alessandro Facente, CURATICISM identifies several activities that, although shaped each time in different forms, have the goal to explore the current status of the embedded curator, a long-form voice deep seated in the artist’s practice.
Invitation card photo credit: A Voice To Call Across, Magali Duzant 2015
