Major

3/26/10 - 7/25/10

Fifth Floor

Museum as Hub: In and Out of Context REDUX

Multimedia available  

“Museum as Hub: In and Out of Context” reveals a partnership of arts organizations pursuing experimental methods of exhibition, communication, and collaboration, and considers the consequences of being part of a “hub,” including challenges of producing and exhibiting work in differing international contexts. The yearlong project is conceived as a changing exhibition that incorporates works commissioned by Museum as Hub partners as well as works by an extended network of artists and organizations from around the world. Central to this presentation is the design of the Museum as Hub space by Choi Jeong Hwa that serves as an “envelope” for the year—a flexible space that is an active zone for viewing, discussion, and activity.

For “In and Out of Context: REDUX,” the third stage of this exhibition, artists Ayreen Anastas, Julieta Aranda, and Rene Gabri present an evolving series of works, publications, events, and discussions to explore the museum as a site of exchange and catalyst for experimentation. Through individual and collective works, Anastas, Gabri, and Programs for Research and Outreach (PRO)’s project, Project for a Revolution in New York, or How to arrest a Hurricane, explores art’s potential place in the economic, national, and urban struggles by activating a pool of artists, agitators, thinkers, and former or aspiring revolutionaries to develop a series of works, events, occurrences, and interventions within the museum and in the city. Julieta Aranda’s project, All the memory of the world (We can remember it for you), consists of several newly commissioned sculptures, a wall installation that will develop over a three-month period, a newspaper publication, a screening, and discussions that expose “declarative memory,” a kind of representation of the past that requires articulation. For her, such articulations are part of a process in which we seek to track the truth and our witnessing of it—a type of memory that is contested but for which we become accountable.

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.

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.
New Museum Theater
Thursday, April 15
Part I: 4 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.
Part II: 7 p.m. – 9 p.m.
FREE, limited seating available

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.
New Museum Theater
Friday, May 14, 7 p.m.
FREE, limited seating available

“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, France. Artist Julieta Aranda and invited guests will lead a discussion following the film.
New Museum Theater
Friday, July 23, 7 p.m.
FREE, limited seating available


Click here for a PDF version of the brochure for "In and Out of Context REDUX."

Museum as Hub: In and Out of Context: REDUX” is organized by Eungie Joo, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs.

Click here to view the Museum as Hub Archive of the project “Neighborhood”.

Sponsors TOP

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.


NYSCA NYC Culture

Images TOP

Arrana1_large_thumb
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Julieta Aranda, Memories of things present #1, 2008. Handmade paper from newspapers, water resulting from the paper-making process, glass bottles, vinyl appliqués, and pedestal, dimensions variable.
Photo: Julieta Aranda

Arranda2_large_thumb
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Julieta Aranda, Memories of things present #2, 2008. Wine glasses, newspaper, and cotton, seeds, dimensions variable.
Photo: Julieta Aranda.

Gabri_large_thumb
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Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri,
we will all feel the pinch, before noon or soon thereafter,
or
i am a political prisoner
you are a political prisoner
she is a political prisoner
he is a political prisoner
we are political prisoners
they are political prisoners,
2005–10 (detail). Works on paper, notebooks, diagrams, cutouts, and miscellaneous ephemera, dimensions variable

Gabri2_large_thumb
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Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri,
we will all feel the pinch, before noon or soon thereafter,
or
i am a political prisoner
you are a political prisoner
she is a political prisoner
he is a political prisoner
we are political prisoners
they are political prisoners,
2005–10 (detail). Works on paper, notebooks, diagrams, cutouts, and miscellaneous ephemera, dimensions variable

Profiles TOP

Ayreen Anastas

Ayreen Anastas is often not exactly herself and thus feels fields of attraction pulling her to and away from that same self. She is not very good at getting to the heart of things nor does she trust words to do so for her. She often wonders, what is the meaning of a biography without a life. Her method is repetition without boredom. She slightly suffers from the English language, yet she intensely loves you and has little or no worries in letting you know. To write by fragments: the fragments are then so many little stones on the perimeter of an unrecognizable geometric figure: she spreads herself around: her whole little universe in crumbs; at the center, what?


Julieta Aranda

Julieta Aranda was born in Mexico City and currently lives between New York and Berlin. Her multidimensional practice deals with a range of themes including circulation mechanisms and the idea of a “poetics of circulation”; the politicized subject or the possibility of a politicized subjectivity; the perception and use of time; and one’s power over the imaginary. Projects take the form of printed media, installation, video, and community organizing. As co-director of e-Flux with Anton Vidokle, she developed the projects Pawnshop (currently in Beijing), and e-flux video rental, which started in the e-Flux storefront in New York in 2004, and has traveled to more than fifteen venues worldwide. Her work has been exhibited internationally in venues such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2009), where she was the first artist to do a solo presentation for the “Intervals” exhibition series; Kunstverein Arnsberg (2010), MOCA Miami (2009), Witte de With (2010), Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2007), 2nd Moscow Biennial (2007), MUSAC Spain (2006), and VII Havana Biennial (2000), among others.


Rene Gabri

A philologist might speculate that this name means or signals the rebirth of non-believing. A historian would look to Tehran, where this name was assembled, attempting to find out how a French name René could attach itself to the name of a Zoroastrian tribe. An anthropologist would object to the very designation of Gabri as non-believer, arguing that not believing in Allah or God does not necessarily mean not believing in anything. An ethnographer would patch together a chronicle of the unforeseeable rituals, events, and passions which would assign this Parska-hay child, this name. A schizoanalyst would reject all of these attempts to delimit this life under the circumscription and signification of this name. Instead, she would emphasize the collective which took up this name: a multiplicity of lines. First she would identify the abstract and segmentarized lines which proceeded at various points to cross over the body assigned this name. The earthquakes, revolutions, genocides, wars, emigrations, racisms, explosions, implosions, collisions, events, which, from time to time, shifted the named’s center of gravity and presented a matrix of forces. At the same instant, she would trace all the flight paths, the becomings, the attempts to collectively assemble a plane of consistency, to confound and deterritorialize perceived limits, including those of any biography. An artist would attempt to find a precise gesture or act befitting each specific time and place this name would be called.