Online event
CIRCA Instagram Live: Cauleen Smith X Hans Ulrich Obrist
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Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show “World Soup” (The Kitchen Show) in 1991 he has curated more than 300 shows. In 2014 he curated the Swiss Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, Obrist’s Art of Handwriting project is taking place on Instagram and is a protest against the disappearance of handwriting in the digital age. In 2013, Obrist co-founded with Simon Castets the 89plus, a long-term, international, multi-platform research project, conceived as a mapping of the digitally native generation born in or after 1989. In 2011 Obrist received the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence, in 2009 he was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), and in 2015 he received the International Folkwang Prize for his commitment to the arts. Obrist has lectured internationally at academic and art institutions, and is contributing editor to several magazines and journals. Obrist’s recent publications include Mondialité, Somewhere Totally Else, Conversations in Colombia, Ways of Curating, The Age of Earthquakes with Douglas Coupland and Shumon Basar, and Lives of The Artists, Lives of The Architects.
Photo: Martin Parr
Cauleen Smith (b. 1967, Riverside, California) lives in Los Angeles, was educated at San Francisco State University (BA) and the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television (MFA), and and currently serves on the faculty of the California Institute of the Arts. In addition to her solo exhibitions at MASS MoCA and the Whitney, she has received single-artist shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and ICA Philadelphia. Her short films, a feature film, an installation, and a performance work were showcased in 2019 at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Her 2018 work Sojourner is currently featured in the exhibition Future Histories: Theaster Gates and Cauleen Smith at SFMOMA. In 2016, Cauleen Smith was the inaugural recipient of the Ellsworth Kelly Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Art. Other honors include the 2016 Herb Alpert Award for Film/Video, a Rockefeller Media Arts Award, a Creative Capital Award, an Artadia Award, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Chicago 3Arts Grant, and residencies at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and Artpace. Smith has been announced as the winner of this year’s Joyce Alexander Wein Art Prize by the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Photo: Harry Gamboa Jr.
Art asks so little of people and it gives so much.
Cauleen Smith in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist
Throughout November, Cauleen Smith has been rewriting and revealing each point of her COVID MANIFESTO in a sort of ‘living’ still life. Over the month, the personal and poetic, the eventful and now historical, featured on the Piccadilly Lights each night at 20:20 GMT as Cauleen responded to Covid-19 and its various aftermaths.
For the last night of her CIRCA residency, Cauleen Smith connected over Instagram Live with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist to discuss the project, evolving from kitchen table musings being posted on Instagram in Lockdown, to 23 high-definition tableau still lives on the largest screen in Europe. They talk about ideas of global collaboration; the role of social media throughout the pandemic; the pros and cons / limits and limitlessness of virtuality; and in the face of this fascination / infatuation with the digital, how might we address the fragile state of our planet with agency.
Furthermore, Cauleen reflects upon the impetus of her MANIFESTOs as acknowledging and acting against the unrelenting racial violence throughout this (and every) summer, to which Han Ulrich frames this body of work as exemplifying the radical vitality of care and generosity in the public sphere that can be generated by culture-making.
CIRCA commissions a different artist each month to present new ideas that consider our world circa 2020. Pausing the adverts every evening at 20:20GMT on the largest screen in Europe, Piccadilly Lights, this November month has been guest-curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose and presented by CIRCA in collaboration with The Showroom.
More information about COVID MANIFESTO here
More information about CIRCA here
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