Leggett Dave
Coco River Fudge series, 2011

Boushnak Laura
Cluster Bomb Survivors, 2006
c-prints (NO DIMENSIONS!)

Ramirez-Figueroa Naufus

Curator: Edward Salem

The works included in the exhibition use performance, agit-prop, social collaboration and
documentary strategies to viscerally address a wide range of concerns. The works are driven by deeply-felt political ideas. Realism and symbolism are accreted. Body and culture, physical and psychic wounds converge in acts of poetic resistance.In the second component of the exhibition, I engage curation as a mode of artistic expression. I solicit written instructions from select international artists, some under travel restrictions (as in the West Bank artists), for a sculptural work that can be constructed remotely, in their absence, and in which participants’ help is needed to implement the plan. I then give the instructions to a crew of local workers, non-specialized with regard to art, and ask that they use their creative input to change the pieces based on their preferences, whims, or ideas of beauty, to create a new, collaboratively conceived work. It is traditional practice in galleries for workers to be hired to physically prepare the space and install the exhibition, often constructing whole set pieces in the artist’s absence, as in Francis Alys’ large, worker-constructed Bolero (Shoe Shine Blues) at Chicago’s Renaissance Society in 2008. In this project, however, the local workers engaged to construct the sculptures have artistic agency and final say, asked to make artistic changes to the artist’s original instructions and/or to change the piece however they wish in the process of building it. The end status and look of each piece rests with the workers. This component of the exhibition involves working with groups of people in their immediate environments and asking them to wield great influence on the project. The equal status given to the workers as collaborators reverses traditional models of artist/worker, remote/local, and authority/employee. While sending written instructions for the performed execution of a work relates tangentially to the written scores of the Fluxus movement, the participants’ role in this project will be not only that of «executor» but also «co-creator». Along with the collaborative sculptural works, the artists’ original written instructions will be displayed.