Others (or the populating æffect of the stars)

Blurring (art)work and labor, as well as art histories and material histories, we work with positions, orientations, realities, relations, economies of bodies and populations through whatever means possible. And we are always thinking about the market, about the economy of art as a medium—about the cultural-industry and our position within it (or without it). About bodies being bought and sold. About work, value, and class. As art-workers and art-dealers as well as artists and writers, our curatorial role combines these distinct but economically connected occupations. We tend to work with artists—workers—that build other worlds from scratch while addressing the history from which the parts that form this other (w)hole emerge. Moving from local, often autobiographical instances to broader global, planetary, or cosmological questions, we follow interconnected systems operating on bodies through kinds of work: transformation, transaction, exchange, production, and destruction. We keep-track of a body and its work as a place-holder (and shared starting-point) between these forces and circulations, and as a potential to derange any readymade systems (while also making-use of them). A record that records altered states, changes of phase—shifts and sublimations. A process and its processing.

How is somebody constructed? How is somewhere built? How is something produced? And how do these processes of de/construction take-place between bodies and their environments? Repeating and remembering these delirious questions asks us to work-through fundamental (but recurring) problems of parallel timelines and intersecting realities tangled around a body (and its interactions with other (types of) bodies). Problems of difference, scale, structure, speed, causality, language. Ethical and ecological problems of how space and time are populated (settled), written, read—territorialized, domesticated, regulated, and monetized. Problems of others: exchange, consumption, violence, transformation, transmission, and love. (Ultimately and initially, our curatorial work is realized through the work of others.)

Beginning with artwork as a condensation or refraction of a body’s superpositions (these series of positions… this listing), the current scope of our curatorial research ranges across global histories of colonization, industrialization, technology, capitalism, and their connections to local structures of citizenship, race, identity, language, dis/ability, sexuality… all the slivers of saying who someone (or something or somewhere) might be. Starting speculatively and critically, we are wary of the conventional techniques and tools of discourse used to position works of art (and artists), and instead route our knowledge through anti-colonial and non-Western art histories and aesthetics, while also keeping-track of dominant (Western) discourses (which are still a part of the story, just not the whole picture). More and more, we are curious about deciphering materialities of information and invisible or hidden—seemingly intangible—systems and their actions or consequences on material bodies and infrastructures. (Worlds occur somewhere between this relation: think of a map and how it draws an unreal physical border.) We remember that the approach to how something is studied and displayed definitively changes how and what it is—so we keep our approach circling through multiple versions of itself. And all of this turns on a question we cannot stop asking ourselves: how do we keep-track of ourselves? Or, how do we keep-up with what we are producing, what we are saying? (Along these lines, the documentations of our curations is crucial to our practice.)

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A Note on Economy:

In the context of art fair exhibitions organized through Reisig and Taylor Contemporary, we organize shows as direct encounters with the market, and therefore as a unique way of facing the public and the economy. As a gallery which aims to focalize the often absent political-economic context of exhibitions as part of the literal material of the gallery-space, it is important that the gallery takes-up the space of an art fair as an opportunity to critically engage the economic structures governing the transaction and circulation of artwork. The gallery takes the context of the market as a question of how artworks circulate and what it means for an artwork to become a financial object that is wholly attached to the work of art (or at least its significance), while also having almost no relation to the object or encounter in itself. Therefore, there is the question of the work of art “before and after” the market—before it becomes something else, somewhere else. This particular problem-place of vision, desire, object, consumption, and exchange structures the critical formulation of the gallery’s art fair exhibitions.