42 Walker st

New York

10013

United States

CHROMOCOMMONS

 

Shoplifter/ Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir

The Callas / Lakis & Aris Ionas

Misha Milovanovich

Tula Plumi

Leah Singer 

PRESS ANNOUNCEMENT – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

OPENING: Tuesday May 16 6 – 8pm

LIVE PERFORMANCE BY THE CALLAS AND THE CALLASETTES: 

Dance by Daphne Kyriakidou with Irene Zografou and Dionisia Bosmi presenting their hand woven wearable tapestries 

Exhibition run dates: May 16 - June 12, 2023 12 – 6pm 

 Curation & main text: Sozita Goudouna, PhD 

The Opening Gallery is pleased to present the Group Exhibition Chromocommons featuring Fathom a selection of new works by Shoplifter/Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir and works by the artist collective The Callas, Misha Milovanovich, Leah Singer and Tula Plumi curated by Sozita Goudouna.

The exhibition coincides with the release of a unique publication by Leah Singer and a signed limited edition, as well as a series of numbered prints. The history of art is inseparable from the history of color and this history is a also. shared history. Chromocommons presents and puts on display sculptures, two-dimensional pieces, and live acts that explore the ways colors can be commons that enable us to create and live differently.

Visual perception is one of the most important mediums for our acquisition of knowledge and for our experience of our environment, of the physical world including our own bodies and others, while color is one of the most dominant components of our perception. Nevertheless, the physical world and the world of objects do not contain color and aren’t colored as we experience them. Color isn’t a physical property of objects; thus, our blood is not red, the sea isn’t blue, the trees aren’t green.

By definition, color suggests and implies connectivity and commonality since it exists only through connectivity.As Maurice Merleau- Ponty states ‘Claudel has a phrase saying that a certain blue of the sea is so blue that only blood would be more red. The color is yet a variant in another dimension of variation, that of its relations with the surroundings: this red is what it is only by connecting up from its place with other reds about it, with which it forms a constellation, or with other colors it dominates or that dominate it, that it attracts or that attract it, that it repels or that repel it. In short, it is a certain node in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive. It is a concretion of visibility, it is not an atom.’[1]

The color appearance of an object can be changed by changing the color of light that shines on it and the color of visible light depends on its wavelength. White light is composed of all of the colors of the rainbow, because it contains all wavelengths, and it is described as polychromatic light. Color glows with the light of the radiant sun and creates a relentless spectacle of sheer visibility, of an intense luminosity that can even be blinding. Drawing from our different perceptions of color, color vision deficiency and even “achromatopsia” (total color blindness), the participating artists trace common interpretations of the notion of color as sensation, visual and sensorial experience, psychological property of visual experiences, mental property, representation, construction of the brain, but most importantly the formulation of commons through color perception.

 


[1] [Originally from The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 130-55 in the 1968 translation. This version from Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwin, Routledge (2004).] 

Dance by Daphne Kyriakidou with Irene Zografou and Dionisia Bosmi presenting their hand woven wearab

The Shoplifter: Fathom

Synthetic and natural hair has become the signature art material of the Icelandic artist Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir, also known as Shoplifter. Each strand of hair is a drawing, the gestures of lines on a paper that have come to life existing as sculpture and colorful suspended three-dimensional paintings made with fibers.  The fibers are tamed and transformed from their original intent into various artwork from braided and tufted wall work to her large-scale installations and small, microscopic curiosities mixed with other materials like handblown organically shaped glass capsules entrapping the fibers in her most recent series of work Phantoms. The Fathoms seem to sprout and grow of their own accord from the gallery ceiling, a floating forest. The hair is divided between the human-made and natural and within this installation that dichotomy seems to have completely dissolved. This world of Fathoms feels both universal and microscopic, you could be walking through nebulae or through synapses within your own mind. “Fathom” in English means to grasp or be able to dream or imagine something and is an old unit for measuring, from one palm of your hand the other. That same word, Faðmur in Icelandic, means to embrace or hug. The artist’s inspiration lies deep within her fascination with fibers, the texture, and colors that the artist selects, entangles and tames. The results a wild and brilliant chromatic ecstasy that makes you feel comforted, joyous, and embraced on a multi-sensory level. The colors penetrate the retina and trigger the neurons in the brain that automatically start producing oxytocin, the body's feel-good hormones, and together with its alluring and familiar texture we can be affected by the maximalism of her creativity.

 Artist Bio:

Shoplifter / Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir is one of Iceland’s leading contemporary artists, based in New York. Working with both synthetic and natural hair, her sculptures, wall murals and site-specific installations explore themes of vanity, self-image, fashion, beauty and popular myth. For Shoplifter hair is the ultimate thread that grows from our body. Hair is an original, creative fiber, a way for people to distinguish themselves as individuals, and often an art form. Humor plays a large role in her life and work, sometimes subtly, but at other times taking over. Shoplifter represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and her installation Chromo Sapiens opened at the Icelandic Pavilion in May 2019 in Venice, Italy. The installation later traveled to Iceland opening at the Reykjavik Art Museum in January 2020. Other recent work includes solo exhibitions at Kulturhuset Stadsteatern in Stockholm, Sweden (2020), The Savannah Collage of Art and Design in Georgia (2020), Kiasma, the Finnish National Gallery (2019), the National Gallery of Iceland (2017), the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2017) and the Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art in Australia (2016). Notable projects and awards include her large window installation created in collaboration with art collective assume vivid astro focus (avaf) for MoMA, Museum of Modern Art in New York (2008), The Nordic Award in Textiles and The Prince Eugen Medal for artistic achievement from the King and Royal Crown of Sweden (2011). 


The Callas / Lakis & Aris Ionas: Embroidery

The Callas / Lakis & Aris Ionas:  Embroiderism Now!


At "Chromocommons," The Callas / Lakis & Aris Ionas, present a new and older body of hand embroidered tapestries. The pieces are designed by Lakis & Aris and crafted by their mother Ioanna and their aunt Anastasia, who are mostly based and work at The Callas farm (a DIY lab / studio / festival space / warehouse among olive and orange trees) in Thermissia, Peloponnese. Their influences ranging from Thomas Pynchon's helter skelter structures to Cycladic architecture, and from the No Wave scene to Rebetiko DIY recordings alluding to a freak-out blend of Mediteranean Psychladic collective creativity. During the opening night the open collective will present a new series of hand woven wearable tapestries and a live gig/performance by The Callas featuring The Callasettes. Embroiderism Now!

Artist Bio: The Callas / Lakis & Aris Ionas

The Callas is the tip of an open art collective that produces artworks, films and music initiated by the brothers Lakis & Aris Ionas. Selected art shows and collaborations include: Onassis Stegi (Athens, 2022), New Museum (NYC) - DESTE foundation (Athens) / Benaki Museum, Documenta 14, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), The Opening Gallery (New York), Family Business (NY), Athens Biennial (Athens), Andreas Melas Projects (Athens), State Of Concept (Athens), The Breeder (Athens), Kustera Projects (New York), Atopos CVC (Athens), Yinka Shonibare Space (London) among others. The collective has collaborated with Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth) and Jim Sclavunos (Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds) on music albums and live performances. In 2013 The Callas produced the film “LUSTLANDS” (HAOS film) that premiered at the 7th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival. Their feature film "The Great Eastern” premiered at Onassis foundation – Stegi and Documenta 14."The Great Eastern," shot at DESTE’s foundation project space - Slaughterhouse in Hydra,  premiered at Onassis foundation – Stegi and was screened at Documenta 14. Their recent film "SICK" was selected and premiered at Thessaloniki International Film Festival. Live performances include: Liverpool Psychedelic Festival (Liverpool), The Great Escape Festival (Brighton), Reeperbhan Festival (Hamburg), Indietracks Festival (Derby), Indigenes Festival (Nantes, France), Scala (London), The Lexington (London), Sala Apolo (Barcelona) and with the Thurston Moore band, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Ty Segall, Television Personalities, Ian F. Svenonius and Grinderman. “Velvet Room” was established by The Callas in 2005 as one of the most active D.I.Y. cultural spaces/collectives in the center of Athens. The open collective curated some of the most seminal artzines in Athens (Velvet magazine, LUST magazine). They have also curated 5 bus tours/events throughout Greece with bands, artists, and filmmakers (Velvet Bus 2008 - 2011). According to OCULA Art and Stephanie Bailey "So many things have shaped the landscape of contemporary art in Greece since the 2000s, from the Athens Biennale's agitprop and Dakis Joannou's DESTE Foundation's summertime slaughterhouse shows on Hydra, to Gregory Markopoulos' unfolding magnum opus in Arcadia, Eniaios. Then there's The Callas."  in https://ocula.com/magazine/features/the-callas-drop-lsd-in-athens/

The Callas / Lakis & Aris Ionas:  Embroiderism Now!


At "Chromocommons," The Callas / Lakis & Aris Ionas, present a new and older body of hand embroidered tapestries. The pieces are designed by Lakis & Aris and crafted by their mother Ioanna and their aunt Anastasia, who are mostly based and work at The Callas farm (a DIY lab / studio / festival space / warehouse among olive and orange trees) in Thermissia, Peloponnese. Their influences ranging from Thomas Pynchon's helter skelter structures to Cycladic architecture, and from the No Wave scene to Rebetiko DIY recordings alluding to a freak-out blend of Mediteranean Psychladic collective creativity. During the opening night the open collective will present a new series of hand woven wearable tapestries and a live gig/performance by The Callas featuring The Callasettes. Embroiderism Now!

Artist Bio: The Callas / Lakis & Aris Ionas

The Callas is the tip of an open art collective that produces artworks, films and music initiated by the brothers Lakis & Aris Ionas. Selected art shows and collaborations include: Onassis Stegi (Athens, 2022), New Museum (NYC) - DESTE foundation (Athens) / Benaki Museum, Documenta 14, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), The Opening Gallery (New York), Family Business (NY), Athens Biennial (Athens), Andreas Melas Projects (Athens), State Of Concept (Athens), The Breeder (Athens), Kustera Projects (New York), Atopos CVC (Athens), Yinka Shonibare Space (London) among others. The collective has collaborated with Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth) and Jim Sclavunos (Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds) on music albums and live performances. In 2013 The Callas produced the film “LUSTLANDS” (HAOS film) that premiered at the 7th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival. Their feature film "The Great Eastern” premiered at Onassis foundation – Stegi and Documenta 14."The Great Eastern," shot at DESTE’s foundation project space - Slaughterhouse in Hydra,  premiered at Onassis foundation – Stegi and was screened at Documenta 14. Their recent film "SICK" was selected and premiered at Thessaloniki International Film Festival. Live performances include: Liverpool Psychedelic Festival (Liverpool), The Great Escape Festival (Brighton), Reeperbhan Festival (Hamburg), Indietracks Festival (Derby), Indigenes Festival (Nantes, France), Scala (London), The Lexington (London), Sala Apolo (Barcelona) and with the Thurston Moore band, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Ty Segall, Television Personalities, Ian F. Svenonius and Grinderman. “Velvet Room” was established by The Callas in 2005 as one of the most active D.I.Y. cultural spaces/collectives in the center of Athens. The open collective curated some of the most seminal artzines in Athens (Velvet magazine, LUST magazine). They have also curated 5 bus tours/events throughout Greece with bands, artists, and filmmakers (Velvet Bus 2008 - 2011). According to OCULA Art and Stephanie Bailey "So many things have shaped the landscape of contemporary art in Greece since the 2000s, from the Athens Biennale's agitprop and Dakis Joannou's DESTE Foundation's summertime slaughterhouse shows on Hydra, to Gregory Markopoulos' unfolding magnum opus in Arcadia, Eniaios. Then there's The Callas."  in https://ocula.com/magazine/features/the-callas-drop-lsd-in-athens/


Misha Milovanovich, Noir, 2023.

Misha Milovanovich: Noir


Misha Milovanovich’s new work for the Opening Gallery comprise of a one-of-a-kind sculpture. The sculpture is a fusion of fragmented cubism, biomorphic surrealism, and dynamic visual humor, and infused with shamanic force, which pays homage to the natural world. "The artist's latest work, crafted from Finnish Baltic Birch plywood and shellack, is a playful exploration of historical references that reimagines their antecedents, unleashing new prospects for the interpretation and significance of abstract forms in space." These Noir sculptures often embody organic contours and textures, evocative of natural shapes such as animals and plants. In addition to these influences, Misha's work draws inspiration from Japanese aesthetics and design principles, exemplified through simplicity, asymmetry, and the use of negative space and use of angle in joints. The new sculptures possess a unique quality of reflection, almost as if they were shadows cast by a hidden light source. This aspect of the sculptures adds an extra layer of depth and intrigue to their already captivating design, drawing the viewer's attention and encouraging a closer examination of the pieces. The interplay of light and shadow on the organic forms of the sculptures creates a dynamic visual experience that is sure to leave a lasting impression on anyone who sees them.

Artist Bio:

Misha Milovanovich

Misha Milovanovic is a Belgrade-born artist based in London. She works across several mediums, from sculpture to painting and digital art. Characterized by vivid color, optical movement and energetic visual cadences, Misha's visual work fuses a diverse repertoire of images and forms. Misha's work is often a symphonic abstraction. Her colorful, densely layered works are held in a state of tension between order and chaos, rational structure and spontaneity. She combines depth and surface relief, orchestrating bold contrasts of form, texture, and space in her pictures. An intimate color palette of bodily fluids - red, pink, white, black, yellow, and brown - animate the writhing forms and the refracted memories of cartoonish cultural production. A cultural polymath, the artist is constantly engaged in observing society and it’s distortions of desire, lust and attitudes to the body. Traditional techniques have been studied and absorbed and although her work is partly conceptual, it's execution always reflects these hard-won technical abilities. 


Leah Singer, Ruby Drawings, 2023.

Leah Singer: The Ruby Drawings


In 1915 the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin wrote a groundbreaking paper on form perception and introduced the study of figure/ground relationships. Rubin’s widely known black and white profile and vase illustration, used in the study, tricks the viewer into a back and forth of seeing either two profiles facing each other, or the shape of a vase formed in the center. Rubin discovered that in ambiguous drawings like this, the figure always dominates over ground and its what we see first. Willem De Kooning, although a pioneer of abstract expressionism, did not forsake the figure in his work and was criticized in his time for depicting women as harsh and unflattering. He said, “Beauty becomes petulant to me. I like the grotesque. It’s more joyous.” The Ruby Drawings are a mash up of silhouettes cut from rubylith — a masking film resistant to UV light used in the printing process to isolate parts of a photograph. The rubyliths were byproducts of newspaper production and were collected when I worked as a photographic archivist at the New York Daily News. The cut silhouettes have been scanned and used in groups to build enigmatic forms. The introduction of intersecting color further distorts the figure to ground connection. The amassed library of rubylith images has served in many of my projects including my copy newspapers—all graphic silhouettes with no text—produced at small printing presses across the country. As much as there is a formality to these works, a concern with form and color, figure and ground and a suggestion of the figurative inside the abstract, they were done quickly without too much deliberation to maintain a sense of play and spontaneity.

Artist Bio: Leah Singer

Leah Singer’s ever-evolving body of work includes film, sculpture, photography, printmaking, book publishing, product design, illustration, and jewelry. Her experiments with 16mm film provided her with a signature style that further evolved through her use of modified projectors during live musical performances. An interest in the silhouette grew from a self-published newspaper she made called copy. The paper was critically acclaimed; it is in the artist book collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. A limited collection of tote bags under the copy label sold at: Colette (Paris), A.P.C. (Paris, New York, Tokyo), Printed Matter (New York), and The New Museum Bookstore (New York). The newspapers popularity led to invitations from Nike to work on a New York City Runner’s Map followed by other projects such as the holiday visuals for a department store in Tokyo, the windows of Barneys New York’s flagship store, and t-shirt graphics for the Beijing Olympics. Her artwork has shown worldwide at such institutions as: Magasin3, Stockholm; Centre Pompidou, Paris; MACBA, Barcelona; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She lives in New York City with her husband and frequent collaborator Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth) and their two sons. 


Tula Plumi’s Light in January and Light in March

Tula Plumi’s Light in January and Light in March are made of thin bamboo sticks glued together, creating surfaces that are painted with different colors and forms. A light is attached to each piece, creating a play on shadows and references to visual phenomena such as eclipses. The titles refer to W. Faulkner's novel Light in August.

Artist Bio: Tula Plumi was born in 1980 in Heraklion, Crete and currently lives and works in Berlin. She has studied at Athens School of Fine Arts. Recent shows include: Overturned at Art Geneve, Weavings at Museum Benaki 2019 Athens, Bed Manners at Kunstpunkt, Berlin 2019; Jelato for all, Jelato gallery, Mallorca 2019, A Museum – A History of 100 Years – Museum of Modern Greek Culture, Athens 2018. Her work has been shown at Musee national d’art modern Centre Pompidou, Emst National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Kunsthalle Athena, Athens Biennale 3.

The Opening Gallery was launched as an initiative that supports contemporary art and international artists beyond the confines of the art market, while it fosters cultural engagement and exchanges between the US and the globe. This alternative art ecosystem attempts to go beyond prevalent gallery models and to showcase global underrepresented artists, and the work of women artists and artists of color. Proceeds support neurodiversity and charitable causes, and are donated to the non-profit Luv Michael, which is committed to enriching the lives of autistic adults.

Press Contact: Adam Brown adamdb95@gmail.com

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Confessions: A collaboration between Gabriele Tinti and Andres Serrano recited by Vincent Piazza

The Opening Gallery and ERIS ART are pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Andres Serrano. Opening Saturday, April 22 at 42 Walker Street, this will be the artist’s first significant foray into painting. The exhibition celebrates the release of Confessions: a highly distinctive artistic collaboration between Serrano and the acclaimed poet Gabriele Tinti.


Serrano is one of the world’s most renowned artists. His new works mark a departure from the medium with which he is most closely associated, while also exemplifying the imagination and critical intelligence that he has always brought to bear upon it. They originated as oil pastel drawings that Serrano made over black and white photographs of sculptures by Michelangelo, in a process that he likens to automatic writing: “The resulting images are different from the pictures that inspired them,” he writes, “but I hope the spirit of Michelangelo is there.”

Serrano’s Confessions images amount to a formidable engagement not only with an artistic predecessor, but also, like so much of his work, with Christian iconography. Embodying a very particular kind of beauty, they lend a new emotional force to ostensibly familiar artistic depictions of religious narratives.

Serrano’s collaboration with Gabriele Tinti has led to a haunting meditation on religion, violence, and physicality. Tinti, author of the Montale Prize-winning collection Ruins, has produced a sequence of poems that are as remarkable for their lyrical expressiveness as for their forceful compactness. Often disquieting and always uncompromising in their vision of the human capacity to do harm and be harmed, these poems are Tinti’s most impressive body of work to date.

A deluxe, signed, numbered special edition will be available for sale at the exhibition, and the launch event will feature a reading of selected poems from Confessions by the actor Vincent Piazza (Boardwalk Empire, Jersey Boys).

Andres Serrano is an American artist. Renowned for his ambitious and challenging installations, he has won acclaim for series of photographs including America (“the photographs give such vivid presence to their sub- jects that it is hard not to feel genuinely moved”—The New York Times) and Torture (“both a call for justice and a compassionate portrayal of the human plight”— The Guardian).

Gabriele Tinti is an Italian poet and writer. He has worked with the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropoli- tan Museum of Art, and the British Museum (among many other institutions), and his poems have been performed by actors including Abel Ferrara, Malcolm McDowell, Robert Davi, Marton Csokas, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Fry, James Cosmo, Michael Imperioli, Franco Nero, Burt Young, Michele Placido, Alessandro Haber, Jamie McShane and Joe Mantegna. In 2018 his ekphras- tic poetry project Ruins was awarded the Premio Mon- tale with a ceremony at the Museo Nazionale Romano in Palazzo Altemps.

The Opening Gallery was launched as an initiative that supports contemporary art and international artists beyond the confines of the art market, while it fosters cultural engagement and exchanges between the US and the globe. This alternative art ecosystem attempts to go beyond prevalent gallery models and to showcase global underrep- resented artists, and the work of women artists and artists of color. 50% of the proceeds support neurodiversity and charitable causes, and 25% of the proceeds are donated to the non-profit Luv Michael, which is committed to enrich- ing the lives of autistic adults.

ERIS ART is the art branch of independent publisher ERIS PRESS, based in London and New York. The press publish- es art, literature, and nonfiction, with a particular emphasis on politics and philosophy. Recent and forthcoming titles include Maurice Saatchi’s memoir Do Not Resuscitate: The Life and Afterlife of Maurice Saatchi, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s short story collection Book of Water, Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr.’s No Politics but Class Politics, Kenneth Goldsmith’s I Declare a Permanent State of Happiness, and Thomas Schlesser’s biography of the artist Anna-Eva Bergman, Luminous Lives.




New York Arab Festival at Opening Gallery

ANCIENT FUTURES - A Contemporary Visual Art Exhibition by NEW YORK ARAB FESTIVAL (NYAF) at the Opening Gallery

April 10-21, Opening Reception Monday, April 10, 6-8pm

New York, NY, April 7, 2022 – New York Arab Festival (NYAF), in partnership with The Opening Gallery, presents “Ancient Futures" an exhibition of painting, digital, performance and video art by Ahaad Alamoudy, Obaid Al Safi, Mariam Sadik, and Manar Abdelmaaboud, curated by Adham Hafez, taking place at The Opening Gallery on 42 Walker Street in TriBeCa from April 10-21, 2023. The exhibition is powered by Wizara, and is supported by the non-profit organisation Greece in USA.


The opening reception is Monday, April 10 from 6-8pm. Talks and events are scheduled throughout the exhibition’s run (April 10-21).


The exhibition explores tradition, mythology, and recurring symbolism, as it looks at icons and narratives in today’s changing Arab world. Saudi Arabian artist Ahaad Alamoudy’s videos utilize underground pop-Saudi songs as scaffolding to build contemporary artworks that look at consumerism and investigate economic and aesthetic change across a shifting class system.


Saudi Arabian Obaid Al Safi uses artificial intelligence and code to reinterpret ancient Arabian poems. Through a complex process that shuttles back and forth between art and technology, he turns visuals into sound and turns sound into an elusive and fleeting moving image.


Egyptian American painter and performance artist Mariam Sadik takes the female Arab body as a terrain of investigation. She looks at the impact of dating apps on marriage and love in what she describes as the marriage market as she grapples with her self-image as a careful social construct.


Manar Abdelmaaboud, a New York Egyptian visual artist, working out of Brooklyn, uses painting, drawing, and collage to address issues of power, control, liberty, and agency. Her painterly interventions disrupt and mock the norms and normality of dominant socio-political systems, push or challenge their rigid absurd boundaries, and represent their influence on and intervention in every aspect of private domestic life.


An unconventional survey of artistic positions and change in the Arabic-speaking region and its diaspora, this exhibition invites us to journey, question, doubt and laugh through the work of four incredible artists.



Join us tonight, Monday April 10th, at the opening reception, on 42 Walker Street, 6pm-8pm




About New York Arab Festival (NYAF)

New York Arab Festival (NYAF) was established in 2022 to celebrate Arab American Heritage Month, and to fight the erasure of Arab and Arab American identities from New York City, a place that Arabs have called home for over three centuries. NYAF is a multidisciplinary festival of art, culture, design, food, philosophy, and intersecting industries. It programs artists from the entire Arabic-speaking region, the Arab diaspora, and Arab American artists, particularly artists working and living in New York City. Founded by Arab, American and Arab American artists, curators and cultural producers Adham Hafez, Adam Kucharski, Cindy Sibilsky, Marwa Seoudi and partners.


The second annual New York Arab Festival (NYAF) 2023 Edition takes place in venues across NYC from April 7 through early May to honor and celebrate Arab American Heritage Month, which coincides with Ramadan this year. New York Arab Festival (NYAF) is programming multiple live in-person events in partnership with several pioneering institutions across NYC, the USA, and internationally.


About The Opening Gallery

The Opening Gallery (42 Walker Street, Manhattan) was launched as an initiative that supports contemporary art and international artists beyond the confines of the art market while it fosters cultural engagement and exchanges between the US and the globe. This alternative art ecosystem attempts to go beyond prevalent gallery models and to showcase globally underrepresented artists and the work of women artists and artists of color. In addition, 50% of the proceeds support neurodiversity and charitable causes, and 25% of the proceeds are donated to the non-profit Luv Michael, which is committed to enriching the lives of autistic adults.


Kenneth Goldsmith’s  "I Declare a Permanent State of Happiness"

OPENING: Tuesday March 7 • 6 - 8pm PERFORMANCE: LIVE MUSIC BY JOHN ZORN

Exhibition run dates: March 8 - April 5, 2023 • 6 - 8pm


The Opening Gallery and ERIS ART are pleased to present Kenneth Goldsmith’s critically-acclaimed I Declare a Permanent State of Happiness. The exhibition coincides with the release a beautifully produced second edition of the book, and a signed limited edition, as well as a series of numbered prints.

I Declare a Permanent State of Happiness is a re- markable engagement with one of the most impor- tant philosophical works of the twentieth century, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Written as a series of numbered propositions, Witt- genstein’s treatise is an ambitious attempt to elu- cidate the relationship of language to logic and to reality. Goldsmith’s response to the text is a testament to the highly distinctive artistic vision that characterizes all of his work. Inspired by the Tractatus but also boldly inventive, Goldsmith’s images reveal the breadth and depth not just of Wittgenstein’s genius, but also of the intervening artist’s creative fervor.

Collages, drawings, sketches, handwritten com- ments, blacked-out and blanched text, shopping receipts and scans-within-scans – these are some of the techniques that appear in this body of work. The exhibition will put on display the most dazzling of the original artworks reproduced in Goldsmith’s book. Innovatively presented in the Opening Gal- lery’s stunning exhibition space, this is a unique opportunity to witness an extraordinary form of creative and intellectual dialogue. The exhibition is curated by Sozita Goudouna and Alex Stavrakas.

Original works, as well as the second edition of I Declare a Permanent State of Happiness will be available for sale, together with copies of a deluxe limited edition of the same book, and prints.

 

Kenneth Goldsmith lives and works in New York City. He teaches writing at the University of Penn- sylvania. In 1996, he founded UbuWeb (http://ubu. com), the largest site for the free distribution of avant-garde materials, and in 2013 he was named as the inaugural Poet Laureate of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In addition to I Declare a Permanent State of Happiness, his books include Wasting Time on the Internet and Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb, the latter of which was awarded the 2020 Prix François Morellet.

The Opening Gallery was launched as an initiative that supports contemporary art and international artists beyond the confines of the art market, while it fosters cultural engagement and exchanges between the US and the globe. This alternative art ecosystem attempts to go beyond prevalent gallery models and to showcase global underrepresented artists, and the work of women artists and artists of color. 50% of the proceeds support neurodiversity and charitable causes, and 25% of the proceeds are donated to the non-profit Luv Michael, which is committed to en- riching the lives of autistic adults.


Goldsmith’s recent artistic works are among the most powerful and provocative to have appeared in the last few years. HILLARY: The Hillary Clinton Emails was displayed in conjunction with the Ven- ice Biennale at the Despar Teatro Italia in 2019. It turned the seemingly banal act of printing out the former presidential candidate’s leaked emails into a widely discussed installation that was as notable for its conceptual brilliance as for its underlying political statement. Goldsmith’s ongoing project Retyping a Library was displayed at the Lofoten International Art Festival in 2022.

ERIS ART is the art branch of independent publish- er ERIS PRESS based in London and New York. The press publishes art, literature, and nonfiction, with a particular emphasis on politics and philosophy. Re- cent and forthcoming titles include Maurice Saatchi’s memoir Do Not Resuscitate: The Life and Afterlife of Maurice Saatchi, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopou- los’s short story collection Book of Water, Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr.’s No Politics but Class Politics, Gabriele Tinti and Andres Serrano’s Confessions, and Thomas Schlesser’s biography of the Norwegian artist Anna-Eva Bergman.

Press Contact: Angus Ledingham, angus@eris.press


A/TYPICAL NOW

February 9 - March 4th 2023 
Participating Artists: Yuli Aloni Primor
Elena Bajo
Lena Christakis
Ronan Day Lewis
Maria Louizou
Ioanna Pantazopoulou
Costa Picadas
Anna Samara
Sagarika Sundaram
Iria Vrettou 
Woozy
Agni Zotis
.
Tuesday  - Saturday 12 - 6pm

On Saturday March 4th 2023 the Opening Gallery will present ATYPICAL:: FURTIVE SPEECH ACTS, a day of performances and poetry readings to celebrate the closing of the gallery's current exhibition ATYPICAL.


There will be a performance by Elaine Angelopoulos from 4-5pm.Then at 6:30 there will be a poetry reading with Brittany Adames, Bahaar Ahsan, Christina Chalmers, Rachel Stuart, Leda Koutsodaskalou and Jackie Abhulimen. This event is co Curated by Sozita Goudouna, Terrence Arjoon, and Adam Brown. 

Bahaar Ahsan is a poet from the Bay Area living in New York City. She is the author of Gay Girl Hyacinth (Eyelet 2021).


Brittany Adames is a Dominican-American writer. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and featured in Half Mystic, Palette Poetry, Vagabond City, Rust+Moth, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at Brooklyn College.


Christina Chalmers is a poet, translator, and researcher, and her new book Subterflect is forthcoming from Distance No Object Press. Other chapbooks include Truant of the Stintless Sun (1080), and willingness (materials).


Elaine Angelopoulos lives and works in New York City. She is an artist with an interdisciplinary approach that bridges her studio practice with audience participation, with select installations and performances. Her work has been exhibited in New York, the United States, and in Europe. Angelopoulos received a Franklin Furnace Fund/Jerome Fellowship in 2014/15. Recently, she performed for POPc, an organization that fosters dialogue about philosophy.


Jackie Abhulimen is a writer, scholar and activist from Athens, Greece and currently living in New York City. Her activism in dismantling the inequities that shape the migrant experience in Europe has been featured in the New York Times, Aljazeera, NPR to name a few, and in local Greek press. She has given speeches in the Greek Parliament, served on the Greek National Council Against Racism and Intolerance, and presented in conferences across Europe. She now works in cultural programming, writes on diasporic culture and practice and is currently working on her first manuscript of poems.


Leda Koutsodaskalou is an actor based in Athens and New York. She just graduated from Tisch School of the Arts with an MA in Performance Studies. Among others, she has collaborated with The National Theater of Greece, the National Theater of Northern Greece, The Athens and Epidaurus Festival and Stegi Onassis Cultural Center. Her last film credit is Midnight Skin by Manolis Mavris that is going to premier in May.


Rachel Stuart is a poet living in Brooklyn. She writes on a typewriter.


Wet Conceptualism

The Opening Gallery
42 Walker St.
New York City
Opening date: Tuesday, December 13, at 6 – 8PM
Dates: December 13, 2022 – February 7, 2023

Participating Artists: Coleman Collins, Constance DeJong, Jimmie Durham, Charles Gaines, Leslie Hewitt, Agnieszka Kurant, Olu Oguibe, Jimmy Raskin, Martha Rosler, Allen Ruppersberg, Chrysanne Stathacos, Carol Szymanski and others.

Curated by Warren Neidich and Sozita Goudouna 


WET CONCEPTUALISM aims to establish a category of conceptual art called Wet Conceptual Art. As there was no category of Wet Conceptual Art at the time of conceptual art’s invention, the works that would be understood here to fulfill its requirements were either included in the canon of Dry Conceptual Art, as a default gesture, or left out completely. Dry Conceptual Art is that form of conceptual art that we are most familiar with, as it was elucidated in Lucy Lippard’s and John Chandler’s essay The Dematerialization of Art.  Wet Conceptual Art has different sources than traditional Dry Conceptual Art. While Dry Conceptual Art emerged from the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp such as the Bicycle Wheel of 1913-1916, or the proto-minimalist paintings of Kasmir Malevich such as Black Square, 1913 as well as the Lettrism movement of Isidore Isou, Wet Conceptual Art emerged from the collective works of Francis Picabia (especially his work The Caodylic Eye,1921) the soft sculptures of Meret Oppenheim—especially Fur Covered Tea Cup, Saucer and Spoon, 1936—Situationism’s emphasis upon mapping and the time based, comedic and sometimes graphic works of Fluxus Art. Whereas Sol Lewitt, especially his early work, Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner were the strongest advocates of Dry Conceptualism at its inception, artists like Adrian Piper, Yoko Ono, Martha Rosler, Bas Jan Ader and the curator Seth Seigelaub were the secret trail blazers of Wet Conceptualism. Both Wet and Dry Conceptualism were born in the heyday of the 1960’s counterculture as a response to the revolutionary spirit of the time. For several reasons, which this exhibition will attempt to clarify, Wet Conceptualism was subsumed by Dry conceptualism and would have to await until now for the right entanglement of certain social, political, economic and technological relations to make its voice known. Wet Conceptual Art is not so much about the immaterial object as it is about precarious and immaterial labor characteristic of the cybernetically inflected information and knowledge economies and as result performance and the poetic are emphasized. Both Dry and Wet Conceptual Art stressed the importance of indexicality above and beyond representation, but their modes of presentation differed since Dry Conceptualism was usually presented as black letters on a white background while Wet conceptualism was polychromic. Both forms considered consumer society’s misuse of language as a call to arms. However, Wet conceptualism went one step further in understanding language’s innate complicity with patriarchy, racism, and sexism.  While Dry conceptualism was Eurocentric and patriarchal, Wet Conceptualism stresses a global, post-humanist outlook. Dry conceptual art was withdrawn, restrained and cold while Wet Conceptualism is engaged, hot, and vital. Dry conceptualism stressed an economy of means as a reductivist attitude which was connected to Minimalism while wet conceptualism engaged with a more maximalist and anarchic approach to everyday life. Instead of following the edicts of German Idealism, Wet conceptualism found its precedents in materialism. In most instances, Dry conceptualism abhorred what it referred to as “stupid painting” because of its retinality: the assumption, based on many statements of Marcel Duchamp’s that painting was absorbed with the sensual rather than the rational which pertained to the grey matter of the brain. Wet conceptualism embraces the wet painterly surface as a space to investigate the conceptual basis of emotions, feelings and affect which have become important in the new economy of emoji’s and Big Data. In other words, Wet conceptualism is a new methodology of artistic hermeneutics or interpretation conceived for its time. Dry conceptualism is about a binary dichotomous viewpoint, and stresses gestalt psychology while wet conceptualism is more non-binary and engaged with perception in action or what are called affordances. Finally Wet Conceptual Art is linked to the concept of wetware used to describe neural based computational systems because they are full of salt water whereas dry or crunchy are terms used to describe artificial intelligence run by digital computers.  


For more information concerning Wet Conceptualism please go to http://wetconceptual.art/ 

The Opening Gallery was launched in the summer of 2022 as an initiative that supports contemporary art and international artists beyond the confines of the art market, while it fosters cultural engagement and exchanges between the US and the globe. This alternative art ecosystem attempts to go beyond prevalent gallery models and to showcase global underrepresented artists, and the work of women artists and artists of color. The gallery is managed by an independent non-profit contemporary art organization and it is located at 42 Walker st in Tribeca. Exhibitions include visual and performing arts, music events, with public programs spanning a wide range of topics also focusing on mental health. The Opening Gallery has monthly public programming and educational activities. Admission is free. *50% of the proceeds support neurodiversity, charitable causes, and 25% of the proceeds are donated to the non-profit Luv Michael which is committed to enriching the lives of autistic adults. 


Charles Gaines | Agnieszka Kurant | Warren Neidich 

Jimmy Raskin presents a short film on his work, followed by a Discussion

Friday the 27th of January at 6:30

Screening and discussion of Miguel Abreu’s 1991 short film,which captured Jimmy Raskin on the eve of his new role as the ‘Documentarian of The Poetic Impulse.’ Abandoning art making as he knew of it, in this film Raskin contemplates his new role as “lecturer / performer,” which would define his expressive career for years to come.

Jimmy Raskin’s work is included in the galleries current exhibition, Wet Conceptualism Curated by Warren Neidich and Sozita Goudouna. For more information on Wet Conceptualism please go to http://wetconceptual.art/

Jimmy Raskin (b. 1970, Los Angeles) lives and works in New York. A graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, Raskin has exhibited his work internationally and staged “lecture-performances” in institutions, art galleries and other non-traditional gathering places since the mid-1990s, notably at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Thread Waxing Space, Foundation 2021, Greene-Naftali, Cooper Union, Miguel Abreu Gallery, SculptureCenter, as well as at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Real Art Ways, Hartford, The Swiss Institute, Paris, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.




David Maroto
On The Artist's Novel

Wet Conceptualism: Perspectives from the Global South

Syd Krochmalny and Carlos Huffmann in discussion.

Moderated by Sozita Goudouna and Warren Neidich

 

Saturday, February 4th, 2023, 2 pm

Opening Gallery

42 Walker Street

New York City, New York

 

www.wetconceptual.art

 

 

Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s-1980s took place at the Queens Museum in 1999 curated by Queens Museum Director of Exhibitions Jane Farver, the artist Luis Camnitzer and Rachel Weiss Professor at the New School. It contained over 200 works by artists all over the world with the purpose to understand conceptual art in its broader context. As it states on the Queens Museum website, the show was meant to “question the hegemony of the object over ideas in art, critique the way art is institutionalized both in museums and in modern economies, and find a new role for art and the artist in society by involving art in social and political protest.”  Wet conceptualism shares many of these concerns but recontextualizes them in the context of cognitive capitalism in which the brain and mind are the new factories of the 20th century and the importance of immaterial labor subsumes the importance of the dematerialized object. Today we are overwhelmed and suffocated by immateriality and a material rebuttal is necessary as a form of dissensus. Our generalized intelligence has been reconfigured in our world of deep learning neural networks, robotics and wet ware.  Wet conceptualisms interest in ecologies of knowledge is the starting point to engage with Global Conceptualism through the experience of our two guest artists from the global South in an attempt to relinquish the aporias of Dry Conceptual art.
 

Carlos Huffmann is an artist and director of the Art Department of the Torcuato Di Tella University. He served as the main professor of the Work Analysis Seminar within the Artists Program during 2017, 2021, and 2022, and regularly teaches classes both in the Artists Program and in undergraduate courses at Torcuato Di Tella University. He graduated with a Bachelor of Business Economics from UTDT (2001) and the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts)-Master of Fine Arts, School of Art (2005). He was the editor of the art section of the online magazine Otra Parte Semanal. He regularly publishes texts about art in various media, such as Otra Parte, the Radar supplement of Página 12, artists’ books, and various blogs, among others. In 2020, the first monographic book on his work was published: Strange Ruler for a Heart. His main individual exhibitions are “Compostasmas” (2022, Ruth Benzacar Gallery, Buenos Aires), “Hito de Frontera” (2019, Art Week, BA), “Recursiva” (2018, Constitución Gallery, BA), among others.

 

Dr. Syd Krochmalny is an artist, curator, writer, researcher, musician, and Professor of Arts, Literature and Social Sciences. His multimedia work has been exhibited at the Reina Sofia Museum, Harvard University, David Rockefeller Center, the Malba, the Americas Society, Cultural Center of Memory Haroldo Conti, Remembrance Park, University of Oslo, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, MAC de Niteroi, Pinacoteca San Pablo, The University of Edinburgh, Museum of Contemporary Art in Buenos Aires, and the Guggenheim, among others. Syd has published Diarios del Odio (Journals of Hate, 2016), Débil (Weak, 2017), Los Sueños (The Dreams, 2018), El Tamaño de mi mundo (The Size of My World, 2021), Ramona, debates en el arte al filo del Milenio (Ramona, Debates in the Art on the Edge of the Millennium, 2021), and he wrote a prologue for Crypto Currency and Sovereignty (2022), among others. Syd was a part of several magazine projects, including editor of the magazine and subsequent book, ramona, co-founder and editor of the magazine, Jennifer, and co-founder and editor of the CIA magazine for the Center for Artistic Research (CIA), an Artist Program and a Masters Program on Latin American Art in Buenos Aires where Syd Krochmalny was Professor, the Pedagogical Director, and International Relations. Syd was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Columbia University. Syd is the Director of Barro in New York

Warren Neidich is an artist, theorist and curator who works between New York City and Berlin. He is founder and director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art which will concern Apparatus, Apparatus, Apparatus in collaboration with the Brooklyn Rail. His work,The Statisticon Neon, is on view in the exhibition Singing in Unison curated by Phong Bui and From the Society of the Spectacle to the Consciousness Industry at the Taipei Digital Arts Festival, Taipei, Taiwan. Neidich’s An Activist Neuroaesthetic Reader was just published by Archive Press, Berlin.


Collective Brain

      


October 4th - November 27, 2022

Opening Tuesday October 4th, 6-8PM

 

The Opening Gallery

42 Walker Street, New York

http://theopeninggallery.com

 

 

Opening Gallery is pleased to announce Collective Brain, a group exhibition of works by Alina Bliumis, Jeff Bliumis, Veronique Bourgoin, Alexandros Georgiou, Mat Chivers, Raúl Cordero, Yioula Hadjigeorgiou, Steven C. Harvey, Peggy Kliafa, Artemis Kotioni, Jessica Mitrani, Paula Meninato, Eleni Mylonas, Margarita Myrogianni, Warren Neidich, Alexander Polzin, Dan Reisner, Juli Susin, Dimitris Tragkas, Adonis Volanakis, Hans Weigand, Vasilis Zarifopoulos curated by Dr. Sozita Goudouna. Installed across the first floor of 42 Walker St, Collective Brain attempts to challenge our perception of mental processes with an arrangement of corporeally provoking art pieces, connecting artists who work in divergent media and are convening from diverse localities.  

Contemplating the notion of the mind as a mechanism – a brain system responsible for spatial memory and navigation – Collective Brain offers different viewpoints about the brain and its million neurons by centering neurodiversity as the fundamental concept about how we can understand the physical and biological origins of human emotion in the brain, as well as the conception, exhibition, and reception of the artworks. A section of the exhibition also attempts to comprehend and challenge perceptions about the operations of the non-human brain.  

The revolutionary field of optogenetics allows us to decipher the brain's inner workings using light, however, we still seem to know little about the human mind and certain theorists argue that it is much too complicated to be controlled, while brain and electrostimulation experiments of the 60s and 70s were often unable to clarify which parts of the brain are stimulated by stimoceivers or electro-magnetic radiation.  

Further to the notion of mind control, current scientific research attempts to illuminate the biological nature of our inner worlds and our “projections” namely the ways aspects of the self are experienced by the individual as residing outside the self (Deisseroth K.). Drawing from Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the founder of modern neuroscience, and his claim that “knowledge of the physicochemical basis of memory, feelings, and reason would make humans the true masters of creation, that their most transcendental accomplishment would be the conquering of their own brain,” the exhibition attempts to trace the visualization of the brain's inner circuitry with a deep empathy for mental illness.  

Cajal ventured into science as both an artist and a pathologist, while he became the first person to see a neuron. The scientist visualized the inner workings of the mind with thousands of stunning pen-and-ink diagrams and his exquisite, meticulous drawings of neurons in the brain and spinal cord proved that every neuron in the brain is separate and that neurons communicate across synapses.

There is an on-going parallel between the ‘visualization of the brain’ in the scientific and in the artistic domains and a fascination with the visualization of the neurons, but how can this visualization help us understand the invisible synapses of the collective brain and especially the ways human societies can resist mind control with actual free will.