Joseph Perez performance

People’s Biennial, initiated by Independent Curators International and curated by Harrell Fletcher and Jens Hoffmann, presents work by artists based in five cities considered outside of the mainstream art world – Portland, Oregon; Rapid City, South Dakota; Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Scottsdale, Arizona; and Haverford, Pennsylvania. During a year of curatorial research, Fletcher and Hoffmann have traveled the United States with ICI, meeting with hundred of artists and participating in numerous open calls and public events. They have collaborated with curators at art institutions in each city to find the best examples of artistic expression present in these communities. One of the primary goals of the project is to question the often exclusionary and insular process of selecting art, as well as to propose an alternative to the standard contemporary art biennial, which frequently focuses on art from a few select cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami or San Francisco). Read the rest of this entry →

Independent Curators International (ICI) takes up the Triangle conference’s discussion of networks via a long history of initiating projects that investigate the very nature of this term in contemporary culture. The question of how to define a network, raised in a previous Dispatch on this blog, can perhaps be clarified through consideration of projects that confront the most elemental aspects of exhibition-making: the work itself, and the roles of the artist and curator. Here, we will be posting periodic thoughts on ICI’s activities within networks of various kinds, incorporating input from practitioners with whom we have collaborated recently.

We begin with FAX, an evolving exhibition that began in New York in 2009, and continues to be reconfigured, expanded, and localized as it is presented—often simultaneously—in venues worldwide. FAX invites artists, architects, designers, scientists, and filmmakers to think of the fax machine as a drawing tool, resulting in an exhibition concerned with ideas of reproduction, obsolescence, distribution, and mediation.

The first iteration of the exhibition, held at The Drawing Center in New York, featured a core of works by nearly 100 artists, including seminal examples of early telecommunications art. With every new incarnation, the hosting institutions are encouraged to invite additional artists to submit works, which are then permanently added to the show. New participants submit faxes throughout the duration of the presentation using a specially designed cover sheet by Dexter Sinister. Visitors view the collection of faxes on the walls or flip through archival binders to see over 500 pages of works. Read the rest of this entry →