City of Disappearances
September 10–December 14
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts
California College of the Arts
360 Kansas Street
San Francisco CA 94103
T 415 355 9673
The exhibition City of Disappearances (September 10 to December 14) is a curatorial collaboration and exchange between two internationally significant art collections: the Kadist Art Foundation (located in San Francisco and Paris) and Zabludowicz Collection (located in London, New York, and Sarvisalo, Finland).
Co-curated by Joseph Del Pesco (Director of the Kadist Art Foundation) and Elizabeth Nielsen (Director of Zabludowicz Collection), the exhibition explores the physical and spatial experience of the city as a kind of language spoken around the world—a language of skyscrapers, traffic, human density, technology, affluence, poverty, and noise. Since 2007, the majority of the world’s population has been urban, making it increasingly urgent for us to think about what “the city” means. Whether we choose to view cities as formed by their inhabitants or the inhabitants as formed by the cities in which they live, the city remains a primary dilemma.
Included in the exhibition is Berlin Remake (2005) by the New York–based artist Amie Siegel, a two-channel work that juxtaposes preexisting films of Berlin with contemporary footage of the same locations, presenting a ghostly portrait of a city that has been a prominent protagonist in world conflict. An installation of 32 photographs by Enrique Metinides shows the gruesome and unexpected fates of citizens of Mexico City between 1949 and 1995. And a newly configured sculptural installation by the Scottish artist Martin Boyce captures anxieties related to overproduction and elitism through juxtapositions of high- and low-culture design elements. The other featured artists are Michel Auder, Slater Bradley, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, John Menick, Yelena Popova, and Kelley Walker.
City of Disappearances dramatizes the mutual resemblance of the world’s great cities by borrowing the title of Iain Sinclair’s psycho-geographic “anthology of absence,” London: City of Disappearances (2006), a book Sinclair says is written “by and about” London. The exhibition imagines a transposition and exchange of the living imaginary of London conjured in Sinclair’s book with the fictions and myths of San Francisco. This conceptual and metaphorical exchange will be followed by a real one, when the exhibition travels to Zabludowicz Collection in London, February 27 to May 11, 2014. There it will be renamed Infinite City, after Rebecca Solnit’s atlas of San Francisco.
Accompanying public programs will take place over the course of the exhibition. Please check wattis.org for a schedule.
About the CCA Wattis Institute
The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts was established in 1998 in San Francisco at California College of the Arts. It serves as a forum for the presentation and discussion of international contemporary art and curatorial practice. Through groundbreaking exhibitions, the Capp Street Project residency program, lectures, symposia, and publications, the Wattis Institute has become one of the leading art institutions in the United States and an active site for contemporary culture in the Bay Area. For more information about the Wattis Institute, visit wattis.org.
About the Wattis Institute Limited Edition Program
The Wattis Institute’s edition program offers limited releases by seminal international artists, including Claire Fontaine, Ryan Gander, Mark Bradford, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Tim Lee, Jonathan Monk, Paulina Olowska, Sharon Lockhart, and Catherine Opie. The Wattis series of limited editions affords an opportunity to collect works by some of today’s most significant established and emerging artists. For direct sales and additional information, please contact Micki Meng, Wattis Assistant Director, at mmeng [at] cca.edu or 415 355 9675. Proceeds directly support the ongoing realization of the Wattis exhibition program.
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts
California College of the Arts
360 Kansas Street (between 16th and 17th Streets)
San Francisco CA 94103
T 415 355 9673
wattis.org
