Present
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Project 35
Curated by 35 international curators
To celebrate iCI’s 35th anniversary in 2010, thirty-five leading curators from all over the world have been invited to select one artist’s video each, which they think is important, and should be seen by audiences across the globe now. Project 35 will be compiled onto a series of DVDs with eight to nine works in each of the four chapters, which will be distributed every three months, to provide you with new and engaging programming throughout the year.
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Raymond Pettibon
Curated by David Platzker
Raymond Pettibon: The Punk Years, 1978-86 taps into the steady stream of this California artist’s early graphic arts production, before he appeared on the contemporary art stage. It includes over 200 examples of Pettibon’s powerful designs made between 1978 and 1986, when he was immersed in the Los Angeles punk rock scene, doing the graphic design for Black Flag and other punk bands. Crossing back and forth between music and the visual arts, this project shows Pettibon’s raw imagery, heavily shadowed technique, and characteristic visual punch in formation.
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Harald Szeemann: Documenta 5
Curated by David Platzker
Harald Szeemann: Documenta 5 explores the many facets of one particularly controversial Documenta exhibition, which jumped outside the contemporary art sphere into an expanded realm of activity, a legendary extravaganza that invited both visceral criticism and praise. This specific 1972 Documenta, chiefly curated by the influential Swiss curator, Harald Szeemann, was a pioneering, radically different presentation that was conceived as a 100-day event, with performances and happenings, outsider art, and even non-art. The assembled materials in this exhibition provide a rich jumping off point for art history students, artists, and general audiences to plunge into the international contemporary art scene of 1972, to see what this particularly fertile cultural moment produced.
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Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports
Curated by Christopher Bedford
Despite all that has changed since sexual and social identity became a hot-button topic in art production and discourse throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, one American stereotype still remains particularly entrenched: that of the male athlete. Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports focuses on artists from the mid-1990s to the present who question the notion of the male athlete as the last bastion of uncomplicated, authentic identity in American culture during the preceding decades.
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Experimental Geography
Curated by Nato Thompson
This exhibition explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, as well as the juncture where the two realms collide. Geography benefits from the study of specific histories, sites, and memories. Every estuary, landfill, and cul-de-sac has a story to tell. The task of the geographer is to alert us to what is directly in front of us, while the task of the experimental geographer—an amalgam of scientist, artist, and explorer—is to do so in a manner that deploys aesthetics, ambiguity, poetry, and a dash of empiricism.
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The New Normal
Curated by Michael Connor
The New Normal brings together thirteen recent artworks that use private information as raw material and subject matter. Although the concept of privacy is widely invoked, it is difficult to define. The private sphere encompasses domestic spaces, bodies, thoughts, communications, and behaviors—contexts that are usually rendered inaccessible to the public eye by legal, social, and physical boundaries.
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FAX
Curated by João Ribas
FAX invites a multigenerational group of artists, as well as architects, designers, scientists and filmmakers, to conceive of the fax machine as a tool for thinking and drawing. Although the technology for transmitting printed images and texts over distance dates from the nineteenth century, it was the introduction of commercially available machines in the 1970s that turned facsimiles into a ubiquitous communications medium for international business.
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Broadcast
Curated by Irene Hofmann
Broadcast explores the ways in which artists since the late 1960s have engaged with, critiqued, and inserted themselves into official channels of broadcast television and radio. By co-opting the sounds, images, and presentation strategies of our culture’s dominant forms of mass media, they reveal the mechanisms and power structures of broadcasting systems, and challenge their authority and influence.
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The Storyteller
Curated by Claire Gilman & Margaret Sundell
Responding to the rapid, often violent transformations of the twenty-first century, contemporary artists have displayed a growing desire to activate art’s documentary capacity: its ability to bear witness to events in the world. The Storyteller focuses on artists who use the story form as a means of comprehending and conveying political and social events. For them, the story functions neither as a purely imagined narrative nor as a piece of verifiable information. It is at once temporal and personal, public and communal, persisting through the listener’s interpretive process and through each subsequent retelling.
Future
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Martha Wilson
Curated by Peter Dykhuis
Intended as an evolving retrospective, ICI will facilitate collaboration between curator(s) at each presenting institution and the artist Martha Wilson to select works from overlapping stages of Wilson’s career that suit their own local collections and audiences. Selections may include examples of her conceptually-based performances, videos, and photo-texts, or her work as director of Franklin Furnace, her activities in DISBAND, or her role as a founding member of the Guerrilla Girls.
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People’s Biennial
Curated by Harrell Fletcher and Jens Hoffmann
This innovative project proposes an alternative model to the standard contemporary art biennial, aiming to recognize the talent and unique expression that is present within many communities. At the same time, the openness of this model is intended to reflect upon the often exclusionary and insular nature of contemporary art. Collaborating in partnership with five art centers across the U.S. over a two-year period, the curators will participate in a series of workshops and public events, leading to an exhibition of work by local artists.
Past
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Slightly Unbalanced
Curated by Susan Hapgood
All people have their own psychological quirks; we accept this as an essential element of human nature. During the past fifteen years, more and more artists have been probing these peculiarities, exploring neurosis as a primary subject of their art. Slightly Unbalanced features work that deals with a range of psychological tendencies, including anxiety, obsessive behavior, depression and narcissism. The artists question what constitutes normalcy, and what qualifies as neurosis, a slippery and suggestive endeavor.
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Jess: To and From the Printed Page
Curated by Ingrid Schaffner
Jess (1923–2004) was an influential artist who emerged in the 1950s from within the literary context of Beat culture in San Francisco. Focusing on his intimate ties to poetry, books, and printed matter, Jess: To and From the Printed Page features examples of his celebrated impastos together with many of his collages and designs, as well as the books and magazines in which they were reproduced.
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Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence
Curated by José Roca
Long before large art exhibitions and blockbuster shows, crowds were awed by traveling shows called “phantasmagoria” in which familiar scenes and stories were performed with the use of magic lanterns and rear projections to create dancing shadows and frightening theatrical effects. These lively, interactive events incorporated storytelling, mythology, and theater in a single art form that entertained while providing a space for thinking about the otherworldly—playing with the viewers’ anxieties regarding death and the afterlife. A comparable trend can be seen in works by contemporary artists who create ghostly images to reflect on notions of absence and loss, using spectral effects and immaterial mediums such as shadows, fog, mist, and breath.
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Space Is the Place
Curated by Alex Baker & Toby Kamps
The theme of space exploration—its infinite potential, as well as its historical successes and failures—is the focus of Space Is the Place, featuring installations, paintings, works on paper, and sound and video works made during the past ten years by an international group of contemporary artists.
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High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975
Curated by Katy Siegel & advised by David Reed
Most art-historical accounts of the late 1960s and early ’70s say little about painting, or only discuss its relationship to Minimalism (citing Robert Ryman, Frank Stella, and Brice Marden, among others). Yet many artists during these same years were exploring radical new directions in abstract painting: pulling painting apart, moving it off the stretcher and onto the floor, creating new shapes and structures, using an entire room or the human body as a canvas.
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Shoot the Family
Curated by Ralph Rugoff
Exploring the undercurrents of contemporary domestic life, this exhibition focuses on artists’ portrayals of their own families: photographs and video works of relatives and partners that can be extremely intimate, questioning any pretense of objectivity between image-maker and subject. Made during the last ten years by artists active in North America, Europe, and Asia, the works on view show the influences of traditional family snapshots and documentary and staged photography, as well as Conceptual art and performance art.
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Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art
Curated by Stephanie Smith
Balancing environmental, social, economic, and aesthetic concerns, sustainable design has the potential to transform everyday life and is reshaping the fields of architecture and product design. Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art explores the influence of this design philosophy on artists who combine a fresh aesthetic sensibility with a constructively critical approach to the production, dissemination, and display of art.