New Habits
Inaugural exhibition
1 May–13 July 2014
Grand opening: Thursday, May 1, 18h
Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory
New location as of May 1
Lange Nieuwstraat 7
3512 PH, Utrecht
The Netherlands
T/F +31 (0) 30 231 9995
info [at] cascoprojects.org
Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory opens a new location in the museum quarter of Utrecht! The larger space provides a more generous home for our expanding program with its intensified commitment to artistic and social issues and the growing, varied communities with whom we collaborate.
New spaces
More than triple the size of Casco’s existing space, the new premise is a nineteenth-century school building and former monastery. Casco’s public office and library is designed by Berlin-based architects Jesko Fezer and Andreas Müller in collaboration with designer Maximilian Weydringer. Multiplying the motif of the arch as a recurring element in the building as well as an important support structure in architecture, the architects designed a new “grand arcade” running through the space, differentiating work and meeting spaces, the library, and a new greenhouse. Artist studios next to the office are connected to Casco via a new door that signals a porous relationship between artist studio and art institution. In addition, the building hosts four luminous presentation rooms situated around the historic courtyard Abraham Dolehof.
Working together
The building’s community is made up of In De Ruimte, an open space for use by independent workers and self-organized, cultural activities, and Fotodok, which focuses on documentary photography. Our new location was secured with the support of SWK030 and City Council of Utrecht. This new “common” home in tandem with its central location reinvigorates Casco’s program, and in turn helps galvanize Utrecht’s own art and cultural scene, inviting it to reach beyond its boundaries.
New Habits
To inaugurate the space we are delighted to present New Habits, a cross-disciplinary exhibition and series of activities that unfolds multiple possibilities for altering received habits and forming new ones, based on the commons. The formation of habits is here proposed to function as complement to direct actions taking place across the globe today. The artists and other practitioners address habits that form in everyday practices such as eating, sleeping, working, playing, thinking, and studying, and how they can evolve and be altered to enact a new way of living together. Contributors include Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, Andrea Büttner, Andrea Fraser, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Tehching Hsieh, Ienke Kastelein, Sung Hwan Kim, Annette Krauss, Aimée Zito Lema, Christian Nyampeta, Aimée Zito Lema, Wietske Maas, and Yvonne Rainer. The project is curated by Casco director Binna Choi with Casco curators Sanne Oorthuizen and Jason Waite.
Every Mode of Doing Needs Commoning: An Uncommon Festival of the Common(s)
May 1, 21–24h; May 2–3, 11–21h
To coincide with the opening of New Habits, New York-based artists Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri organize the “uncommon” festival with fellow “commoners” from Utrecht and beyond. The festival works with different communities to bring together, over the course of several days, various ideas, questions, and experiences, unearthing emergent affinities and sensibilities towards common(s) concerns, needs, and desires. The common(s) and practices of commoning produce spaces and temporalities which emerge out of sometimes unforeseen solidarities, affinities, and the opening of new horizons.
Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory is a public organization for artistic research and experiments established in 1990. We consider artistic practice as a way of engaging with the world we live in and as investigative, imaginative, and inventive. The artistic practices we focus on are cross-disciplinary, open to collaboration, and process-driven. Our projects traverse other fields such as design, theory, and social practices. Correspondingly, our activities encompass not only exhibitions but also research, varying forms of production, the development of new applications, workshops, forums, debates, actions, performances, screenings, education, and publishing.
Casco’s program is made possible with financial support of City Council of Utrecht, Mondriaan Fund, DOEN Foundation, K.F Hein Fonds, and European Union Culture Programme.
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Contact: Jason Waite, jason [at] cascoprojects.org / T +31 (0) 30 231 9995
