Winter 2024 program

R.I.P. Germain: Avangarda
January 25–March 25, 2024

SculptureCenter is pleased to present the first exhibition in the United States of R.I.P. Germain. UK-based, R.I.P. Germain investigates how structures of exclusion lead to the creation of para-institutional spaces, practices, and modes of sociality and solidarity. His practice explores how the lack of access to financial, legal, and other forms of state-sanctioned resources foment support systems that respond to the needs of underserved and excluded communities. In New York, R.I.P. Germain will present a series of newly commissioned sculptures in the guise of facades and storefronts. R.I.P. Germain’s presentation will expand his recent explorations of “false fronts”—or spaces that present themselves in one way but function in another. Offering an appearance of banality, they frequently mask an illegal operation, as liminal and precarious spaces of trade, but also as spaces of care and sociality. These engineered facsimiles represent amalgams of frontages for “baggy spaces” (as coined by the artist and the activist-curator Helen Starr), places “found in every city, governed by their own logics—market and moral, they function as ways to serve a community need that otherwise remains unmet.” These conditions generate specific ways to access and operate that cut across typical social hierarchies and stratification. In hyperlocal terms that interrogate what it means to be “in the know,” R.I.P. Germain’s work asks whether such semi-secrecy produces community, reproduces the destructive dynamics of the outside world, or allows for other systems of sociality and value to develop.

Small World Cinema
January 25–March 25, 2024

In collaboration with Taipei Fine Arts Museum, SculptureCenter welcomes Small World Cinema, a presentation of moving image works from the Taipei Biennial 2023 – Small World, to New York City. “Small World,” the theme of the 13th edition of the Taipei Biennial, suggests both a promise of greater control over one’s own life, and a threat of isolation from a larger community. As the curators suggest, our world can become smaller as we grow closer to one another, but also as we grow apart, and Taipei Biennial 2023 – Small World takes place within such a suspended state. Divided into four programs and spread across SculptureCenter’s lower level galleries, Small World Cinema includes works made between 1989 and 2023 by Tekla Aslanishvili; Yin-Ju Chen; Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze; Samia Halaby; Li Yi-Fan; Jen Liu; Basim Magdy; Jumana Manna; Artemio Narro; Bahar Noorizadeh in collaboration with Rudá Babau and Waste Paper Opera (Klara Kofen, James Oldham, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Anna Palmer); Ipeh Nur; Ellen Pau; Oleksiy Radynski; John Smith; Su Yu-Hsin; Wang Ya-Hui; C. Spencer Yeh; and Zhou Tao. Taipei Biennial 2023 – Small World is currently on view in Taipei until March 24, 2024. The exhibition is curated by Freya Chou, Reem Shadid, and Brian Kuan Wood.

In Practice: Claudia Pagès
January 25–February 19, 2024

Claudia Pagès’s work circulates word, body, music, and movement in multiple directions, tracing the continuity of logistics systems (like shipping and transport) alongside legal language and proceedings in hypnotic video installations. Pagès refers to the subjects of her work as “containment architectures,” upholding power through the flow of goods and capital. Pagès’ new work for SculptureCenter is a video sculpture recorded in an Islamic water cistern (aljibe) located in Xàtiva (Valencia, Spain), the first city where paper was introduced in Europe through the Silk Road. Filled with graffiti from different periods, Pagès navigates the cistern through the overlapping of time, marks, and sound.

In Practice: Adriana Ramić
February 29–March 25, 2024

Adriana Ramić’s multidisciplinary and conceptual work arises from the tenuous pathos of sentient traces and translations among lifeforms and machines. Drawing from research into artificial intelligence and machine learning, computational ephemera, non-human cognition, and literature, her work investigates the sensitivity of comprehension and perception, trying to meet machines at their level, and evading the novelty of conditioning them toward human thought and experience.

Support
Generous support for R.I.P. Germain: Avangarda is provided by ARTNOIR and Micki Meng. Special thanks to Neon Fab Studios, New York.

Special thanks to Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

In Practice 2023 is made possible by the generosity of the Elaine Graham Weitzen Foundation for Fine Arts. The Foundation’s support for SculptureCenter’s annual open call exhibition reflects Elaine Graham Weitzen’s (1920–2017) lifelong commitment to emerging artists and her exuberant support of new ideas in art. Weitzen served as a devoted Trustee of SculptureCenter from 1987 to 2017.

Major support for the In Practice program is provided by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. The In Practice program is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Leadership support for SculptureCenter’s exhibitions and programs is provided by Carol Bove, Barbara and Andrew Gundlach, the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation, Jill and Peter Kraus, and Teiger Foundation. Major support is provided by the Marguerite Steed Hoffman Donor Advised Fund at The Dallas Foundation, Karyn Kohl, Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins, Eleanor Heyman Propp, and Jacques Louis Vidal. Support is also generously provided by the May and Samuel Rudin Foundation, Inc., with additional funding from Candy and Michael Barasch, Sanford Biggers, Libby and Adrian Ellis, Jane Hait and Justin Beal, and Amy and Sean Lyons.