apexart :: Maria Lind :: Letter and Event

Letter and Event
curated by Maria Lind

A group of works from around the world deal with the consequences of poststructuralism, identity politics and globalization on personal, "real" levels. They offer no resolution to the ideas and experiences they present, but only distill and observe the inconclusivity of experience.

April 24 - May 24, 1997

291 Church St. New York, NY 10013

Artists: Christine Borland (Glasgow), Annika Eriksson (Stockholm), Douglas Gordon (Glasgow), Renée Green (New York), Henrik Håkansson (Stockholm), Carsten Höller (Cologne), Matts Leiderstam (Stockholm/London)

Lind Book

download pdf of exhibition brochure/book

download pdf of press release


Letter & Event explores the complex relationship between local experience and global perspectives on the one hand, and contemporary reality and fiction on the other. The art works involve both existential and socio-political issues and highlight literal experience, often in the form of events and pseudo-scientific projects. At the same time that they deal with the effects of signification and new technologies on the understanding of "reality", they evoke otherwise compromised concepts like presence and authenticity, trust and empathy.

This attitude can often be found on the relative peripheries, in the middle of marginalized and privileged cultures. This "in-between-position" is intriguing in many ways, not least because of its potential to intertwine the local and the global, usually with a local bias. Letter & Event thus focuses less on a theme, and more on a set of related attitudes and methods and how they are played out and given form in the art work.

Literalizing the link between art and real life, as well as stressing the function of the relative periphery , Letter & Event takes the form of a rhizome with some of the artists showing/working in the gallery and the other half in various places in town. Some of the pieces change during the course of the exhibition and some are restricted to a shorter period of time. For example, Douglas Gordon and Rirkrit Tiravanija will set up an American version of the Cinéma Liberté/Bar Lounge, formerly shown in Montpellier and Rotterdam, where they invite people to have a drink and watch movies which have been censored in the U.S.