Troubling Space: The Summer Sessions
Zabludowicz Collection Curatorial Open 2012
5 July–12 August 2012
Zabludowicz Collection
176 Prince of Wales Road
London, NW5 3PT
Participating artists: Francis Alÿs, Yael Bartana, Walead Beshty, Ethan Breckenridge, Gregory Crewdson, Helene Kazan, Avi Mograbi, Miri Segal, Caragh Thuring, Trisha Baga, Shi Jin, Haegue Yang
The exhibition and free events programme, Troubling Space: The Summer Sessions, considers how space is produced through social relations: shaped by our fantasies, transformed through our occupation, or controlled by violence.
It includes works by eleven artists from the Zabludowicz Collection and a new site-specific commission by London-based artist Helene Kazan. In addition, exhibition designer Emil Krøyer has created a furniture system for the Summer Sessions intended to contextualize the events programme in the gallery and to facilitate its social engagement.
The Summer Sessions are integral to the project: they take a range of recent events in the public space and the shifting (shrinking) space of education as an imperative to put the space of the collection to use, to leave no space untouched by pedagogy and resistance. Each weekend’s programme is centred on a spatial question, with presentations by several of the exhibiting artists as well as a number of invited speakers.
Friday–Sunday, 6–8 July
Spaces of Distribution and Production: Considers the spaces in which commodities, images, truth claims, and architectures are produced and distributed.
Participants include Ethan Breckenridge, Helene Kazan, Anthony Downey, and Caragh Thuring.
Walead Beshty‘s objects testify to their movement through space, and give form to invisible systems of distribution. Ethan Breckenridge contains corporate architecture of the everyday in tinted glass vitrines. Shi Jin‘s diminutive karaoke machines reference the mobile business models invented on the margins of global financial systems. Helene Kazan explores the use of masking tape on windows as protection against exterior force, from natural catastrophe and human conflict. Caragh Thuring‘s paintings depict the industrial paradigm’s breakdown as formal elements abstracted from their usual contexts: floating cranes and giants pulleys displaced across raw canvases.
Friday–Sunday, 13–15 July
The Body in Space: Looks at how the body is produced by the space it moves through, and how it in turn produces that space.
Participants include Trisha Baga, Cliff Borress, Miri Segal, Debra Benita Shaw, and Andrew Merrifield.
Francis Alÿs evokes the memory of protest, demonstrating that the way bodies appear in public is as important as the fact that they gather. The subject of Trisha Baga‘s video work navigates an infinite digital landscape, manipulating both physical and social spaces as part of her sense-making journey. Miri Segal situates the viewer simultaneously in private and public space through a mirror-play, by superimposing the viewer’s reflection on a woman enjoying herself and her lover. Haegue Yang constructs figures out of material culture’s marginalia, endowing these quasi-bodies with the authority of the shaman-figure.
Friday–Sunday, 20–22 July
Spaces of Utopia / Dystopia: Aims to flesh out society’s persistent, even relentless production of non-places and spaces of imagination.
Participants include Thomas Keenan, Avi Mograbi, and Brad Samuels.
Avi Mograbi captures a confrontation with Israeli Defense Force soldiers and questions who has the right to look, to be filmed, to access space, or deny access to others. With her study of men challenging each other in four-wheelers on a Sunday afternoon, Yael Bartana‘s work mirrors Israel’s deployment of high-tech military equipment and its ephemeral geography of boundaries drawn and transgressed. Gregory Crewdson‘s photographs are suburban portraits, an image of space shaped by disavowed desire.
To RSVP for the Friday and Saturday night discussions with dinner, please send an email with your contact information and the session that interests you to rsvp [at] zabludowiczcollection.com.
Troubling Space: The Summer Sessions was selected from over 100 entries to the Zabludowicz Collection Curatorial Open by a panel comprised of Chris Dercon, Martin Herbert, Maria Lind, and Anita Zabludowicz.
Curated by Helga Just Christoffersen and Natasha Marie Llorens.
