Pope.L: Campaign

Join us Friday, November 22 at 6pm, for a special book launch at the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry for Pope.L: Campaign, featuring a conversation with Gray Center Fellows, artist and Department of Visual Arts  faculty member Pope.L and Neubauer Collegium Curator, Dieter Roelstraete; and Gray Center Advisory Council Member and Logan Center Exhibitions Curator, Yesomi Umolu.

Food and drinks will be served.

Free and open to the public. 

About the book, Pope.L: Campaign
This book is a three-part report on a collaboration between artist Pope.L and curator Dieter Roelstraete exploring issues of connectedness, home, migration and art’s relationship to knowledge.

It began in the spring of 2016 with an invitation, extended to the artist by Roelstraete, Monika Szewczyk and Adam Szymczyk, to participate in the 14th edition of Documenta. Pope.L’s contribution was the immersive sound installation Whispering Campaign, consisting of thousands of hours of whispered content addressing nationhood and borders, and broadcast throughout Athens and Kassel using both speakers and live “whisperers.

A month later, a second chapter of the campaign was inaugurated at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts, curated by Yesomi Umolu , revolving around the Brown People Are the Wrens in the Parking Lot project. In this volume, Zachary Cahill looks back upon this complex enterprise, which involved an art exhibit, a DIY media campaign, a thematic library, video interviews and a series of events ranging from impromptu performances and DJ sets to a program of presentations and debates.

The third and final chapter of the artist’s campaign unfolded as a course cotaught at the University of Chicago by Pope.L and Roelstraete, titled Art and Knowledge, which sought to address one of Whispering Campaign’s catchiest and most puzzling slogans—namely, “ignorance is a virtue.” Students were invited to contribute their observations concerning art’s sometimes proudly tenuous relationship to knowledge.

Edited by Dieter Roelstraete. Text by Zachary Cahill, Klea Charitou, Iris Colburn, Tianyu Guo, Jeffrey Hsu, Leon Hösl, Vidura Jang Bahadur, Michal Koszycki, Chichan Kwong, Cristen Leifheit, Jasmin Liang, Brock Lownes, Elizabeth McClafferty, Adrienne Meyers, Pope.L, Monika Szewczyk, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt.

Pope.L: Campaign, edited by Dieter Roelstraete, is supported by The Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the Univeristy of Chicago as part of Pope.L’s and Dieter Roelstraete’s Mellon Collaborative Fellowship at the Gray Center. The book is published by Mousse.

About our speakers
Pope.L is a visual artist and educator whose multidisciplinary practice uses binaries, contraries, and preconceived notions embedded within contemporary culture to create art works in various formats, for example, writing, painting, performance, installation, video, and sculpture. Building upon his long history of enacting arduous, provocative, absurdist performances and interventions in public spaces, Pope.L applies some of the same social, formal, and performative strategies to his interests in language, system, gender, race, and community. The goals for his work are several: joy, money, and uncertainty—not necessarily in that order.

Dieter Roelstraete  is the curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago. He served on the curatorial team convened by artistic director Adam Szymczyk to organize Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel in the spring and summer of 2017. His curatorial interests concern the relationship between art and politics, art as a species of knowledge, art work as intellectual labor, and the conception of exhibition-making as a form of writing. Roelstraete was trained as a philosopher at the University of Ghent in Belgium; the long history of art’s tangled relationship with philosophy decisively colors much of his curatorial and critical work. 

Yesomi Umolu is Artistic Director of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial and Director and Curator, Logan Center Exhibitions at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. She directs a program of international contemporary art in the Logan Center Gallery and contributes to a number of strategic committees on contemporary art, architecture and urbanism at the University of Chicago.