17 Mar 2011

CUE Art Foundation present Hope Ginsburg & Simon Leung

Hope Ginsburg: Curated by Regine Basha

Virginia-based artist Hope Ginsburg constructs immersive, participatory environments driven by her interest in the often-concurrent roles of student and teacher, and in modes of collaborative learning. Ginsburg's installations often assume familiar shapes—a science lab, a flea market, a classroom—however, each project takes on an autonomous life, propelled forward by the on-going contributions of its participants. In a body of work that spans over a decade, Ginsburg has engaged contexts such as corporations, universities, and farms, imagining who she can be within them. Adopting roles such as employee, student, teacher, and researcher, she has made sense of these contexts through direct participation and has generated projects in the form of contributions, oppositions, and propositions. Ginsburg's Sponge project, which began at MIT in 2006, was born of that institution's culture of pedagogy, experimentation and learning by doing. Her shift in identity between student and teacher as she moved into the role of professor has continued to fuel the Sponge project for the past five years. Ginsburg's project at CUE Art Foundation incorporates selected aspects of the past five years of Sponge—a fluid, ever-expanding series of workshops, labs, and object-making gatherings. Exhibition related program: The exhibition will be accompanied by a workshop at Trade School on Saturday, April 9 from 2:30-5:30pm: Feltmaking for Nomads. In this three-hour workshop, participants will produce a piece of felt with an inlaid design of their choosing. The workshop will briefly cover the history, technology, and mythology of wool felt, which may or may not have originated on Noah's Ark. Materials will be provided. Nomadic futures will be conjured. For more information on how to participate, visit tradeschool.ourgoods.org


Simon Leung: Curated by Rirkrit Tiravanija

The work of Los Angeles-based artist Simon Leung serves as a companion guide for examining the dislocation and disparities that are left in the aftermath of war. Pulling inspiration from objects, people, and writing that have been removed from their origins—through the effects of time, circumstance or historical violence, or through his own tactical displacements—Leung recombines these parts to form new allegories that parallel and challenge the received meanings of his source material. This amalgamation of historical specificity and against-the-grain interpretation is rendered in ways that both bestow credence to his original subjects, and open new narratives that question their previous certainty. Using video, performance, and other media, Leung obliquely reinvents the war stories of our time. On view at CUE Art Foundation, Leung's first solo show in New York since 1996, is a new single-channel video exploring these themes: War after War (2011). Exhibition related program: The exhibition will be accompanied by Wars I Will Have Seen — a conversation between Simon Leung and the Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior, held on Saturday, March 27th from 4:00-5:30 at CUE Art Foundation. This event is FREE but RSVPs required, email jessica.gildea@cueartfoundation.org to reserve a seat. For more information on the project, please visit: archiveofthefutureanterior.org