Museum as Hub: In and Out of Context: REDUX
March 26 – July 25, 2010
New Museum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
As a project that thrives on its own evolution, “In and Out of Context: REDUX” invites repeated visits by the public. Details of scheduled events, discussions, and opportunities for participation are outlined below and at www.newmuseum.org/events.
Julieta Aranda
All the memory of the world / (We can remember it for you)
“I remember how to drive a car, even though I haven’t driven one in years. I remember the date of the French revolution. I remember the first time I saw the ocean as a child, I remember my first cat, I remember the smell of my grandmother’s basement, I remember Newton’s laws of gravitation, I forgot my keys in a taxi last night.”
Memory functions at different levels. We remember “how” and we remember “that.” We remember things that never happened. Different people have different recollections of the same event. In All the memory of the world / (We can remember it for you), Julieta Aranda considers the ways in which different people have unique recollections of the same event, how memory is articulated as a representation of the past, and how memory is fabricated, both imagined and misremembered. All the memory of the world / (We can remember it for you) is an examination of mnemonic processes in an evolving presentation that touches upon personal memories, false memories, processes of historical memory, institutional memory, amnesia, confabulation, erasure, and clairvoyance as a memory of the future.
Inspired by Alain Resnais’s 1956 film, Toute la mémoire du monde, the project includes a screening of Resnais’s film on June 10. Over the course of the exhibition, Aranda’s project evolves as layers on one wall of the Museum as Hub space, and will be accompanied by a newspaper publication. Each of these elements will address a particular aspect of memory to investigate its implications and responsibilities in the production of present reality.
Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri, Programs for Research and Outreach, and additional participants (forthcoming)
Project for a Revolution in New York, or How to arrest a Hurricane
Project for a Revolution in New York, or How to arrest a Hurricane asks, “If 1989 marked the great victory of so-called free-market-capitalism over the state-capitalism of the Soviet Union, what exactly does 2009 mark? Can one live through revolutionary times without a revolution?” Departing from a suspicion that history has not ended, they acknowledge that though the recent financial collapse will not be the last, it does mark a point of no return. For them, increasingly contracted periods between cycles of boom/bust and a growing awareness that government’s most important role today is to serve the interests of capital, makes it difficult to imagine that current political arrangements can continue without increasing conflicts.
For their Museum as Hub commission, Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, in collaboration with Programs for Research and Outreach (PRO), propose a project that takes up art’s potential place within these struggles and emerging conflicts. Looking back at deriving inspiration from earlier moments and movements, they attempt to assemble one possible diagram for a desiring or revolutionary machine. The project consists of a concatenation of events, seminars, gestures, and utterances attempting to address and break out of a perceived contemporary malaise, a collective (and thus political) depression accompanied by a palpable catatonia. Given its ambitions, the project involves a pool of artists, agitators, thinkers, and former or aspiring revolutionaries.
Taking the form of overlapping programs—Programs for Analysis; Programs for Praxis; and Programs for Poïesis—the ambition of the project is to share a process with a public and create some possibility for involvement.
Public Programs
Thursday, April 15 | Part I: 4 p.m.–6:30 p.m. | Part II: 7 p.m.–9 p.m.
Potentials for Collective Research and Action: Activism, Analysis and Aesthetics at a Crossroads
Organized by Programs for Research and Outreach (PRO) in association with Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, this event will shift between elements of a seminar, screening, lecture, and discussion.
FREE, limited seating available
Thursday, May 13, 7 p.m.
After all these introductions I wish to say something
This cinema event by Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri is an open-ended “film” emerging out of various lines of inquiry and influences ranging from Situationist experiments, concepts of cinema verité, and performance art of the 1960s and ’70s. The screening will be the first and last time this work is shown.
FREE, limited seating available
Thursday, June 10, 7 p.m.
Toute la mémoire du monde / All the memory of the world screening and discussion with Julieta Aranda and guests
This 1956 film by Alain Resnais is a portrait of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Artist Julieta Aranda and invited guests will lead a discussion following the film.
FREE, limited seating available
Please visit www.newmuseum.org for detailed directions and information.
Museum as Hub is made possible by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts. Endowment support is provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Skadden, Arps Education Programs Fund, and the William Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund for Education Programs at the New Museum.
Organized by Eungie Joo
