Exhibition
September 19–October 26, 2012

Nanna Debois Buhl: Street Haunting

Street Haunting by ISCP resident Nanna Debois Buhl features three newly commissioned works that all utilize the act of walking in unexpected ways. For each work, Buhl has created a system where a walk becomes the impetus for images and stories, revealing new paths through urban and literary landscapes.

In Buhl’s work Collected Walks, a hybrid fictional character travels across time and space. The installation combines a soundtrack composed of literary fragments about women walking through different cities with a series of cyanotype prints made by Buhl on her daily walks over the course of the months leading up to the exhibition. The print series Street Haunting revolves around photographs of a young woman found by Buhl on a walk. These photographs are presented along with divergent readings from five psychics who speculate on the young woman’s life and persona based on a set of questions used for character development in scriptwriting. For the slide installation Night Map, Buhl has transferred the Parisian route of two lovers from Michèle Bernstein’s 1961 novel La Nuit (modeled on the classic novel Les Liaisons dangereuses) to East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Starting from the very location of the exhibition, Buhl has created a new setting for the story through the détournement of texts and maps.

By exploring the role of the Flâneuse, Buhl connects different literary periods and fields of writing in singular ways. Voices from the politically-charged 19th century works of George Sand and Flora Tristan fuse with Virginia Woolf’s reflections on the imaginary possibilities of walking and with Michèle Bernstein’s semi-autobiographical descriptions of dérives through Paris as a member of the Situationist International. The exhibition unravels new routes through the city as well as through literature, addressing the walk as a way to experiment with identity and to carve out a space for reflection. For Buhl, walking is at once a physical act (done of necessity or otherwise), a mode of production, and a metaphor.

Nanna Debois Buhl (born 1975, Denmark) received her MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2006 and participated in The Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, in 2008-09. Recent shows include: El Museo del Barrio, NY; Art in General, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Bureau, NY; Lunds Konsthall, Lund, Sweden; and Kunsthallen Brandts, Odense, Denmark. Her work is in the collections of the Museum for Contemporary Art and The National Museum of Photography in Denmark. In 2010, Revolver Publishing published her artist’s book A Journey in Two Directions and the collaborative book City Grammar (with Liz Linden). Her work has recently been reviewed in Art in America, Artforum, and The New York Times.

A commissioned text by Jen Kennedy, Social Studies and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellow at Binghamton University, will be developed in response to the project and published in conjunction with the exhibition.

ISCP thanks the following contributors for their generous support: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, Consulate General of Denmark, New York, The Greenwich Collection, L & O Frame Inc., National Endowment for the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

Opening Reception: Sep 19, 2012, 7-9pm
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Participating Residents

ISCP Talk
September 4, 2012

Brooklyn Commons: Fred Wilson and benandsebastian

Brooklyn Commons, a new discussion series beginning this fall at ISCP, presents intellectual and artistic pairings between the established Brooklyn-based artist community and ISCP residents. This series puts artists in conversation who have not shared a dialogue in the past and focuses on the vibrant and diverse cultural practitioners living and working in Brooklyn, both long-term and short-term.

Fred Wilson and Danish collaborative benandsebastian will discuss the politics of display and the re-imagining of the historical narratives of objects. Wilson’s work has explored themes of display and how objects in museum collections carry or reveal political and institutional power structures. benandsebastian’s ongoing project, Phantom Limbs, explores how systems of display are involved in embedding meaning in spaces and artifacts during conditions of absence. The duo’s work employs architecture as a way of thinking,  which is explored through mythical stories, utopian models, economic systems, and power relations.

Fred Wilson (born in 1954 in Bronx, NY) lives and works in New York. Wilson has received numerous awards including, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award (1999), as well as represented the United States at La Biennale di Venezia (2003) and the Cairo Biennial (1992). Wilson’s work has been exhibited internationally including a retrospective of his work Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979-2000 (2001-2004). In 2011 Ridinghouse, London published Fred Wilson: A Critical Reader bringing together a significant amount of texts about the artist’s work and exhibitions.

Ben Clement (born 1981 in Oxford, United Kingdom) and Sebastian de la Cour (born 1980 in Copenhagen, Denmark) live and work in Berlin. benandsebastian are graduates of  University College London, Cambridge University and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Recent solo exhibitions include: Phantom Limbs, Trapholt Museum, Kolding, Denmark (2012) and Unbuilt Extremities, Friedelstrasse 27, Berlin (2011).

Brooklyn Commons is organized by Kari Conte, ISCP Director of Programs and Exhibitions.

Participating Residents

ISCP Talk
August 21, 2012

Salon: Rebecca Baumann and benandsebastian

Rebecca Baumann will discuss recent kinetic and performance works. Central to her practice is an ongoing fascination with the complex workings of human emotion and the pursuit of happiness through celebration and ritual. Methodically planned and choreographed, Baumann’s works are a formal and conceptual excursion into the nature of color and materials. Involving an element of activation, the visibility of color is in constant flux, referencing the innate change of our emotional selves and the greater world.
benandsebastian are interested in how meaning becomes embedded in spaces and artefacts in conditions of absence. benandsebastian will speak about the process of re-examining their body of work through their ‘Phantom Limbs’ book project. This project has involved the duo exploring non-linear narratives and working with their studio space at ISCP as the inside of the book.