NOTES ON EXHIBITION
Change is hard. That’s why we make conditions to it. Incremental, sudden, drastic, unconscious. Anything but to own it. To change.
How does an artist in the studio faces change? How does one react when facing it?
During the confinement, many boldly made declarations of change. Some moved to greener open spaces, others declared the development of better environmental and social practices. But in a swift wind, soft blow and a turn of a leave, most things are back to normal. Not very much for the better, and mostly for the worse.
Gallery exhibitions plough on. Paintings are press released, Instagramed and FOMOed. The things that we once stopped and asked, had talks, round tabled and conferenced about, went nowhere.
The six weeks exhibition rotation, why? The constant cycle of transport, shipping material waste does not alter one bit of our massive carbon footprints. Climate awareness here becomes nothing but lip-service. Why, as a private enterprise, does a gallery have a structure to follow? An art fair schedule, a carousel of routine as if someone out there says you are NOT supposed to reinvent the wheel.
An artwork lives. There is no timeline in which it exist. It should not be bound to a 5x5m2 booth space, or painted and hung on a wall. It has to live, and interact with, be understood. It needs to be related, to be challenged, to think about. It should not be “press-released”, paid “reviewed”, exhibit once and stored.
WE GOTTA CHANGE.
I am not sure if I can call it an exhibition or an experiment. All I know is that it is a platform for works to breath, to be interacted with, to be challenged.
I took the condition of change as a departure and selected a group of works that extrapolate change from its own objecthood. They are objects in reform:
Starting from the first selection of works, I have initiated conversations and invite artists to engage with them by presenting and replacing their own works along the way. There is no time frame to this exercise. WE GOTTA CHANGE will recur, be rehung, replaced with as much or as little time it takes to spark a change. In my point of view, it can evolve through time, within the given structure of a group show, a space equally could be given to a single artist to overtake the entirety of the platform simply because they can.
Joseph Tang
WE GOTTA CHANGE
with works by Sean Bluechel, Olivier Foulon & Alexander Lieck, Marijn Van Kreij, Guillaume Millet, Charlotte Moth, Carlos Reyes & Jo-ey Tang.