User:Morelcasares/e-flux draft exhibitions

Selected Exhibitions
In 2008 Vidokle organized OUT NOW!, a project-as-exhibition in response to the "near total lack of involvement or discussion of this subject by art institutions here in the only country capable of ending the occupation of Iraq." Participants included Patrick Cockburn, Friends of William Blake, Kathy Kelly, Trevor Paglen, Martha Rosler, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Jalal Toufic. During this time the work explored possibilities for a sympathetic cultural backdrop evoking urgent action and conversation toward ending the US occupation of Iraq.

Unbuilt Roads was presented as a public archive at the e-flux project space in 2009—an exhibition based on the book "Unbuilt Roads: 107 Unrealised Projects," Hatje Cantz (1997) edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Guy Tortosa. The exhibition brought together descriptions of unrealized projects by more than a hundred artists, the result of several years of international research conducted in the late ’90s by Obrist and Tortosa. A subsequent iteration of the project was presented in 2011 as the Agency of Unrealized Projects (AUP)—a temporary office in Basel, exhibiting its growing archive of several hundred unrealized art projects—as well as temporary residence at the daadgalerie in Berlin, September 9—October 20, 2012.

From May 26th – July 31st, 2009, the archives of the Chemnitz-based Raster-Noton label —founded by Carsten Nicolai and Olaf Bender in 1999 — were presented at e-flux in the form of a non-commercial record store. Raster Noton: The Shop consisted of publications (featuring Raster Noton’s distinct approach to graphic design), CDs (to be displayed as physical objects), and sound (for listening on mp3 players), the Raster Noton archive offered a panoramic view of the label’s output of nearly 100 releases, or ninety hours of audio material.

In the autumn of 2009 (August 28–November 16), e-flux presented If You Lived Here Still... An Archive Project by Martha Rosler, the archive of the artist’s foundational project from 1989, “If You Lived Here…” Part research-based artwork, part curated group show, part discursive series on and around the subject of homelessness and housing in America, “If You Lived Here…” took place at the Dia Art Foundation building in Soho, New York City, in 1989. In structuring her project, Rosler worked with the young artist and student of urbanism Dan Wiley as well as with a self-organized group of homeless people calling itself Homeward Bound, and with such groups as the MadHousers, a Southern architecture collective building “huts for the homeless.” She also worked with numerous advocacy and activist groups in the city, as well as with architects and urbanists. In the exhibition space at e-flux If You Lived Here Still... An Archive Project by Martha Rosler presented documents, photographs, videos and slideshows that revealed the original project's extensive organization. The exhibition included images from presentations since the project began at Dia in 1989 as well as materials sourced from current activist and advocacy groups.

From February 20–April 3, 2010, Allan Sekula: This Ain't China, curated by Monika Szewczyk, enabled visitors to trace key trajectories for Allan Sekula’s entire practice through two Chinas "the Cultural Revolution and the manufacturing powerhouse" in the 1979 photo-text project This Ain’t China: A Photonovel and a new light box Eyes Closed Assembly Line completed in 2010. As the press release explained, “the investigation of his special interest in China leads to other questions concerning the politics and aesthetics of working class refusal, what we might call an ‘attitude of ain’t.’”

In the summer of 2010, e-flux presented Mladen Stilinović: Artist’s Books, an exhibition by the Croatian artist focusing on works produced between 1972 and 2009. In his collages, photographs, artist books, paintings, installations, actions, films, and videos Stilinović mirrors and questions the ideological signs that condition a society. The exhibition Mladen Stilinović: Artist’s Books at e-flux offered the time and space for visitors to engage and spend time with his artist's books. As Mary Rinebold explained "the artist created an anti-exhibition and an anti-opening, an event that didn't aspire to control activity or vision, and testified to Stilinović's ethic of opposites."

Gustav Metzger, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2011 was the first exhibition of then 85-year-old, artist and activist Gustav Metzger in the United Stateswith a subsequent retrospective at the New Museum. The exhibition included two works—MASS MEDIA: Today and Yesterday (2011), and Historic Photographs: To Walk Into – Massacre on the Mount, Jerusalem, 8 November 1990 (1996/2011)—both part of the Historic Photographs series. At e-flux "visitors could mine local newspapers and contribute to the current conversation on credit, extinction, and the way we live now." As the press release states the work "embodies the tension at the core of Metzger’s practice: the use value of science, technology and politics as tools for societal progression, versus their criminal disintegration of the natural world and ethical tendencies."

311 East Broadway (2011–present)
In 2011, Boris Groys curated Out of Town: Andrei Monastyrski and Collective Actions inaugurating e-flux’s new space on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in conjunction with Performa 11. The exhibition takes as its starting point the exhibition “Empty Zones,” curated by Groys for the Russian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, 2011.

Adam Curtis: The Desperate Edge of Now, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, exhibition design by Liam Gillick (February 11–April 14, 2012). An almost complete retrospective of the video documentaries by BBC journalist Adam Curtis was presented at e-flux at the invitation of Hans Ulrich Obrist, with a selection by Curtis.

The fifth iteration of Anselm Franke’s itinerant exhibition Animism (April 26–July 28, 2012) was re-contextualized by Franke for e-flux exhibition’s space and consisted of his selection from the touring show.

Hito Steyerl (October 4–January 5, 2012) was Berlin-based filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl’s first solo exhibition in the US. It premiered two new video works, Abstract and Adorno’s Grey, and include her video essay from 2004, November.

For the Khalil Rabah’s first solo exhibition in the US, Pages 7, 8, 9 (February 2–April 25, 2013), e-flux presented a survey of Khalil Rabah’s work over the last ten years. Rabah’s Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind (2003–ongoing) was established, in the words of its newsletter, “to inspire wonder, encourage discovery, and promote knowledge.” For his exhibition at e-flux, Rabah presented the Summer 2011 issue of the Museum’s newsletter in the form of a printed copy of the twenty-four-page document stacked on the exhibition floor for visitors to take; a red neon sign of the cover’s headline, In this issue: Statement concerning the institutional history of the museum, and a new series of paintings based on pages of the newsletter suspended in sliding archival racks.

The core feature of Rossella Biscotti's The Trial (May 11–July 20, 2013) was a six-hour audio edit of the original courtroom recording from 1982–84 trials of former members of Potere Operaio (Workers Power) and Autonomia Operaia. Despite a lack of evidence, the majority of the prosecuted intellectuals—accused of kidnapping and executing Aldo Moro (head of the governing Christian Democratic Party), and leading the armed Red Brigades organization—were held in prison from 1979 until the trial’s close in 1984. The thinkers of the Italian autonomia movement were the first to recognize a massive integration of labor, exploitation, and creativity that artists continue to grapple with today.

Environments, by Pedro Neves Marques and Mariana Silva (September 17–November 2, 2013) The first collaboration between Portuguese artists Pedro Neves Marques and Mariana Silva presented four new video works in conjunction with three existing video works. The exhibition considered the way in which the 1972 “Report on the Human Environment” titled “The Limits to Growth” influenced the coding of the world into a systems-dynamics model and projected the economy well into the twenty-first century, from which point on an ecological worldview would be meshed with the language of international policymaking tribunals, while finance markets and neoliberalism would become naturalized.

'SOLO SHOW* Robbie Williams (November 17, 2013–January 18, 2014) was a research-based project on art production that presented the work of fictitious artist Robbie Williams, initiated by Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Uwe Schwarzer.

Taiping Tianguo, A History of Possible Encounters: Ai Weiwei, Frog King Kwok, Tehching Hsieh, and Martin Wong in New York. January 28–March 15, 2014. Curated by Cosmin Costinas and Doryun Chong. In recent years, Ai Weiwei, Frog King Kwok, Tehching Hsieh, and Martin Wong have come to prominence in different ways. While they are all of Chinese heritage, they hailed from different places, contexts, and lineages, and have been situated in wildly divergent art historical narratives and discursive matrices. Taiping Tianguo explored actual and concrete, as well as tenuous or even possibly non-existing connections between the four artists in New York in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The second solo presentation of Mladen Stilinović’s work at e-flux, Nothing Gained with Dice(March 28–May 31, 2014) documents the great variety of media and themes comprising the Croatian artist’s work since the 1970s, spanning from language and poetry to politics and daily life, consisting of early experiments in film to visual work centering on among other subjects money, as well as failing socialist and capitalist ideologies.

Anton Vidokle initiated The Museum of Immortality (June 11 – July 18, 2014) at the Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace Program in Beirut. “(T)he show is based on a concept by Boris Groys, and tries to realize the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov’s wild notion of “The Common Task,” whereby a heady, hallucinatory mix of science, technology, political circumstance, and spiritual fervor reimagines the museum as a space for resurrecting the dead and immortalizing all mankind.” The exhibition included more than 50 artists from Ashkal Alwan’s students and faculty to resurrect a specific person, idea or thing.

We, The Outsiders (September 5-November 1, 2014), took as its centerpiece a gigantic egg by Argentinian artist Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos titled Nosotros afuera [We, the Outsiders] (1965). The work “provides a title and script for an exhibition that investigates where consciousness begins and ends in relation to art.”

The Unmaking of Art (November 21, 2014–January 24, 2015) is an exhibition based on Walter Benjamin’s lecture of the same name and takes “(t)he sweeping arc of Western art history (as) the subject of this voluminous exhibition, which consists of hundreds of photographs, paintings, drawings, sculptures, videos, books, and other ephemera.” The installation is coupled with lectures by Walter Benjamin, Alfred Barr and Gertrude Stein, addressing the construction of western art’s history.