If institutional critique has tended to present the structures governing our daily lives as more or less fixed and frustratingly obtuse, Emilio Martínez Poppe—whose work is included in the forthcoming Whitney Biennial—prefers to reframe them as provisional. Informed by his continued research into the functions of civic space, the potential of public art projects, and the social architecture of cities, he examines the incremental actions that have formed such systems, foregrounding our collective responsibility to learn the internal intricacies of the institutions we seek to critique and to make those criticisms in good faith. In lieu of convenient abstractions that reduce the institution to something smooth and comprehensible, his work proposes that we approach it as fragmented—a totality best understood through its individual parts.
In 2024, Martínez Poppe simulated the closure of Petrine gallery’s space at 29 rue des Petites Écuries, Paris. Working parallel to traditions established by Maria Eichhorn and Robert Barry, he devised a comprehensive plan for the dissolution of the business that included writing a public statement, drafting emails to collectors, filing closure documents with the French government, clearing storage facilities, shutting bank accounts, even proposing opportunities for the ongoing representation of its artists. Presented as a simple framed checklist, For Petrine united various aspects of his activist approach to critique, which emphasizes the contingencies of the institution, both as a concept and as a concrete reality.
Because the gallery ultimately remained open, the checklist was effectively out of date as soon as it was exhibited. The gallery’s day-to-day operations ensured the emergence of new connections, relationships, and dependencies that would expand the tasks and complicate the labor of actually closing the gallery. Instead, the checklist’s short shelf life revealed the space to be an ever-evolving organism: constantly regenerating, continuous but never fixed. Where Eichhorn’s 2016 project 5 weeks, 25 days, 175 hours sealed the physical space of Chisenhale Gallery, leaving staff with close to six weeks of paid leave and raising productive questions around artistic labor, Martínez Poppe’s fascination with closure contends instead with the cold, hard logistics of extricating an institution from its community. The artwork opens up a thought experiment about the legacy of the closed space, asking what we will miss when it is gone, and how it might be remembered. By engaging with the unglamorous administration of closure, For Petrine trades in that funny but fundamental truth that understanding is often best arrived at through absence.
Where For Petrine paints a portrait of an art institution through its imagined afterimage, Civic Views (2025) maps the functions of city government through the labor of its employees. Born out of personal conversations with workers from the various governing bodies of Philadelphia, from the Housing Authority to the City Archives, the piece dignifies the thankless labor that is only guaranteed to be noticed in times of crisis, when the system fails, wears out, or is deliberately undermined. First positioned in the courtyard of Philadelphia’s City Hall, and now included in the 82nd Whitney Biennial, it visualizes the ebb and flow of power, funding, and communication that undergirds the social and political infrastructure of the city.
A series of photographs and accompanying texts etched into metal plates are installed on scaffolding in the center of the gallery. Each image depicts the view out of a city office, reproduced at a one-to-one scale, and hung to mimic the precise height specifications and positioning of the actual windows. Compositionally, the images refer back to an early daguerreotype of a windowpane taken by Joseph Saxton, an employee at the US Mint, who captured the view from his office window in 1839. In reprising its format, Martínez Poppe establishes a historical continuity, distilling the monolith of urban infrastructure down to the individuals who comprise it, each faced with everyday choices and obligations, each with a window and a view. The accompanying fragments of texts, excerpted from interviews with the occupants of the various offices documented, underscore the double meaning at the core of the project. A view can be a vista, but also an opinion, a perspective formed from experience, expertise, and belief. These interviews make plain that any attempt to understand how the city operates requires an inquiry into the lived conditions of the individuals who make it so.
Civic Views sits within a lineage of socially engaged art practices that understand the limit of the art object as a political tool, and see that information alone can only incite, rather than enact, change. Instead, the work manifests the research, dialogue, and organizing that inform it; its political valance is located firmly in the actions that surround its production. Contextualized by the current US administration’s all-out war on expertise and recent slashing of government operations, Martínez Poppe’s work insists that any improvement of art and civic institutions necessitates critiquing them as mutable systems, shaped by their workers, and requiring active maintenance. His careful study of institutions—galleries and city systems alike—underscores our collective responsibility for these spaces, challenging the myth that we can expect results by passively hoping for change. And yet perhaps the most powerful part of the artwork is that it never offers a simple answer; rather, we come away asking better questions.
