an interdisciplinary ensemble
CITY OF ART is a platform and collective of visual and performance artists, curators and researchers. It is an interdisciplinary ensemble of curator-artists with the sole purpose of creating multimediatic events, initiatives and programmes that are research-based, educational, curatorial and collaborative.
— The Method —
City of Art projects look to “the curatorial” as an art method in and of itself, with the exhibition becoming the ultimate art object. In doing so the collective seeks to reposition artefacts, reconstruct narratives and reopen artistic debates; creating a friction and a presence that is expressed by a number of individuals investigating a common theme.
The significance of fragments - of objects, people, places and ideas - is that they persist beyond their time or context. Through processes applied to these fragments, there is a reemergence that allows them to shed their relevance to take on new meaning and enthuse novel ideas. Through a reactionary method, our projects takes the status of the fragment and runs with it. It celebrates debate amongst artists and audiences beyond the specificities of art history, allowing our exhibition and performance spaces to tend more towards the mirror at a specific moment, rather than a museum that portrays another. In this way we creates movement and excitement, through a dialogue which is best described as innately and intentionally, “curatorial”. City of Art seeks to explore thematic universality not in the Object, but in the Subject, or rather, the plurality of the views of the subject.
This radical displacement and inversion of art object and viewership is the base of postmodern and contemporary art practices. In the history of art and literature the metamorphosis of sources and plurality of subjectivity has inspired and delivered new fragments that continue the cyclical process of art production.
“At its best, the curatorial is a viral presence that strives to create friction and push new ideas, whether from curators or artists, educators or editors.”
- Maria Lind, “Curating the Curatorial”, Artforum