CREATIVE TIME’S LIVING AS FORM (THE NOMADIC VERSION)/ CURATED BY NATO THOMPSON & CLAIRE GRACE
Press Release:
The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (CCVA) joins Creative Time and Independent Curators International (ICI) to present a customized iteration of Living as Form (The Nomadic Version). Free and open to the public, the exhibition surveys groundbreaking works from around the world that together register one of the most important developments in recent art history: the rise in the last twenty-five years of a renewed sphere of artistic practices that blur the lines between art and everyday life in projects emphasizing political concerns, participation, and forms of dialogue.
The exhibition features two groups of works: twenty-three internationally recognized projects dating from 1991 to 2011, traveling through 2014 courtesy of ICI; and nine recent works by emerging artists and collectives with strong ties to the Boston area and Providence, Rhode Island, selected by the CCVA. Presented works span diverse formal approaches: outdoor video projection, open-air debate, performance, spatial occupation, and a host of others. Agitational, meditative, playful, or didactic, their concerns are equally varied, ranging from border politics to finance capitalism, the prison industrial complex, urban divestment, and systemic racism. They pool tactics from fields as diverse as community organizing and street protest; many works share as much with the history of civic organizations, feminist politics, and radical pedagogy as with the history of visual art. Some projects seek modest, incremental points of contact between art and activism. Others blur such lines more dramatically, extending a long history of both political activism (which has long mobilized skills and strategies associated with art) and art practice (where the idea of dissolving art into life remains a longstanding interest).
The exhibition’s foundation is a flexible constellation of nearly fifty international works selected by Nato Thompson with a network of other curators, touring via hard drive as Living as Form (The Nomadic Version) to venues all over the world. Accumulating new work as it travels, this unprecedented collaboration in turn builds on the earlier site-specific exhibition, Living as Form, presented by Creative Time in New York’s historic Essex Street Market in the fall of 2011.
Artists in the exhibition
Lara Almarcegui and Begoña Movellán; Appalshop; Jacob Berendes; Caitlin Berrigan; Chto Delat; The Complaints Choir; Chris Csikszentmihalyi; DAAR; Farid Djahangir, Sassan Nassiri, Bita Fayyazi, Att Hasheminejad, and Khosrow Hassanzedeh; the Design Studio for Social Intervention; the Dirt Palace; Helena Producciones; John Hulsey; Tomashi Jackson; Suzanne Lacy; Los Angeles Poverty Department; Rick Lowe with Sam Durant and Jessica Cusick; Mammalian Diving Reflex; Mardi Gras Indian Community; Maria Molteni and New Crafts Artists in Action; Walker Mettling; Katerina Šedá; Chemi Rosado Seijo; Athi-Patra Ruga; Slanguage; Ultra-Red; Peter Watkins; Ai Weiwei; WikiLeaks; Women on Waves.
