CURATICISM | The Gam #1
Curated By Alessandro Facente
November 22, 5pm
November 22, 5pm
New York Art Residency &Studios (NARS) Foundation is delighted to introduce CURATICISM | The Gam #1, a Spoken Words Exhibition curated by Alessandro Facente with NARS Artists-in-Residence Tony Cran & Mariana Jandova (Australia and Czech Republic), Sandra Lapage (Belgium/Brazil) and Carlos Eduardo Pileggi (Brazil), Lisa O’Donnell (Ireland) and curator Chelsea Haines (New York) about the concept of “displacement”.
Specifically The The Gam #1 will focus on the artist’s practice in relation to its displacement from one country to another.
The Gam is a series of Spoken Words Exhibitions about the artist’s role in shifting and sharing concepts between different places, with the aim to analyze and debate how their practice enriches the vision and knowledge of a given scenario. Born out of the private and constant dialogues that the curator, Alessandro Facente, constantly has had with the artists in-residence at the NARS Foundation, The Gam is the public outcome where these privately-debated concepts, topics and ideas existing before and during the realization of an artwork, become the shown objects of these spoken words exhibitions. They are structured in such a way as to ask the artists to dig deep into the ways that their ideas are born and solidified, putting their experiences, as artists, into words for an audience. The artists will introduce their processes, in terms not only of making, but also in terms of inner meanings, creative process, failure, chance and their relationships with current approaches to theorizing the artwork as a whole.
Different curators, whose work has proved to be sensitive to the intimate dialogues with the artists, are involved each time as external points of view on issues addressed by the artists during these public sessions. The objective is to stimulate an open debate on “embedded curating”, inviting curators to reflect on the curatorial practice itself as a discipline deeply linked to the artist’s gesture and its evolution over time.
Each conversation will focus on specific issues that, during the private sessions of studio visit, come out of the coherent connections that exist between the responses that the artists give to questions such the following: what the artists are exporting from their home-cities and home-countries, how this displacement is influencing their practice, as well as what and how the latter is adding to this new context and to the American art scene in general.
Borrowing the title from the 53rd chapter of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, The GAM is "A social meeting of two whale-ships". So, as the ships’ crews exchanged information that might be useful for both whale-ships, the artists and curators share and debate information hailing from afar, making the NARS’ space a local “boat-platform” which looks towards a global exchange. The inspiration is related to Melville’s novel opening which is set up at the Battery, downtown Manhattan’s “noble moles” where, according to the novel, “Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries”.
Both metaphorically and geographically, the NARS Foundation’s studios face Brooklyn’s west coast, showing Brooklyn itself as the new “Battery”, a sort of artists’ macro studio, where artists and curators from all around the world land to pursue their ambitions.
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 to 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 as a result of previous projects in Italy, New York and Morocco, Curaticism will identify future activities that, although shaped each time in different forms - such as panel discussions, lectures, exhibitions, spoken words exhibitions, residency programs, etc. - have the same goal: exploring the current status of the embedded curator, a long-form voice deep seated in the artist’s practice, which is totally devoted to observe and debate its evolution.
As the project's title suggests, the aim is to merge curating and art criticism in mutual harmony, letting them be performed in the artist’s life-in-studio, as well as to fill the gap between artistic production and curatorial theory, sheading a new light on the exploration of new cross-sections among artist and curator.
In doing that, Curaticism attempts to rule the curating practice on the fundamental basis of art-making observation. In fact, this kind of curating aims to behave more properly in the remit of art criticism, detecting, observing and debating the ideas and thoughts resulting from an in-process work of art. In this way this discipline explores itself, not just as a practice which creates coherent connections between objects but also between the thoughts and the ideas which exist before and during the production, even if in an early stage.
At this stage Curaticism will debut through a series of Spoken Words Exhibitions named The GAM, representingCuraticism’s first chapter.
Further Spoken Words Exhibitions of The GAM (#2, #3 and so on) will take place over the course of 2015.
