Incommensurable Work (or the Labour of Listening)

2011
Published in Wieczna Radość. Ekonomia Polityczna Społecznej Kreatywności. (Polish) Eds: Michał Kozłowski, Agnieszka Kurant, Jan Sowa (redaktor prowadzący), Krystian Szadkowski, Kuba Szreder. Warsaw: Fundacja Nowej Kultury Bęc Zmiana, 2011.
For all the emphasis on speakers and speaking in the conference format, the event would be utterly ridiculous, pointless even, were it not for an audience – spectators who constitute a community of listeners…

Six Problematics on Artists and Their Work

2011
Published in Wieczna Radość. Ekonomia Polityczna Społecznej Kreatywności. (Polish) Eds: Michał Kozłowski, Agnieszka Kurant, Jan Sowa (redaktor prowadzący), Krystian Szadkowski, Kuba Szreder. Warsaw: Fundacja Nowej Kultury Bęc Zmiana, 2011.
How are we to refigure and reconstitute our very modes of interaction, and modes of self-expression (not demoted to self-exposure) in the process of work, and the very subsistence of our labour (visibility)…

Eccentric Space: Democracy At All Cost and The Indisciplinary Participant

2011
Published in Waking Up From The Nightmare of Participation. Eds: N. V. Kolowratnik & M. Miessen. Utrecht: Expodium, 2011.
Consensus has nothing to do with a common agreement of policies of an expert government, yet permeates and petrifies the normative symbolic order or, to the violent segregation of that which is supernumerary, to that which is otherwise possible…

Choreo-graphies of Round and Round Revolution

2011
Published in And the Seasons: They Go Round and Round, eds. Carson Chan. 0047, 2011
The origin of revolution is not that of violent struggle or upheaval, but rather that which unceasingly occurs as a fact of cyclical movement amongst celestial bodies…

Ten Theses on Publicity* and Art

2011
Commissioned by Alissa Firth-Eagland for the publication project “Secret Publicity”, launched in 2011.
Good art plays with the tensions between art and life without a specific teleology, nor moral lesson. Art does not write policy, nor does it properly educate, it is necessarily supernumerary…

The Politics of ‘I Can…’

2010
Published in Cognitive Architecture. From Biopolitics to NooPolitics, edited by D. Hauptmann and W. Neidich, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers
The shared capacity of comprehension of speech acts, inclusive of the excluded ‘supplement’ of the parts-which-have-no-part is the shared existence of potentiality, the actualization of which is conditional on the given forms of life that govern the ‘inequal’ perceptible order.

From Culpability to Capacity

2010
Published by Onomatopee, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
The ethics of dissensus can only be affective within a fidelity to the event of its articulation. As an aesthetic event, dissensus works upon imaginations towards the forging of other schemas, or possible ordering through a clash of sense and sense – an abutment with given meanings and order of things. Dissensus contaminates imagination…

Improper Human-ness

2010
Commissioned by YYZ Artists Outlet, Toronto
The bond between logos and mythos. – That which is chiasmic is defined by the character ‘X’, signifying a crossing of thought, a togetherness of being apart with preponderance for a paradoxical unity of oppositions.

Potentiality and the Politics of Indistinctive Equality

2010
Published in Shifter (Issue 16), eds. Sreshta Rit Premnath and Warren Neidich
It is symptomatic of the current plight of concept of ‘potentiality’ that one requires the prefix ‘pluri’ to denote an understanding of a highly diversified notion of the term. The dichotomous relationship that has been instantiated between the ‘potential’ and the ‘actual’ is an unfortunate simplification, in which potentiality is reduced to a state of waiting for a catalytic event in order to render it productive, to render it actual, to render it other.

The Struggle for Incapacity…

2009
Published in Framework: The Finnish Art Review (Issue 11)
The existence of presuppositions, and the impossibility of absolute ‘blank-ness’ intrinsic to the field of the empty, repositions the horror of the vacui towards a horror of the virtual – insofar as there is no actual vacui to speak of. The horror of virtuality, is rather related to the palpability of the immaterial assumptions, concepts and clichés as real forces that are not actualized into a material form – the horror of potentiality.

The Lemonade is Weak Like Your Soul… Hadley+Maxwell in Review

2009
Published in Art Papers Nov/Dec 2009
The philosophically rigorous undertones of the exhibition are offset by the playfulness of the works themselves, providing an opening up of thought, rather than a closure of meaning on the part of the duo…

Staging Shadows Without Source

2009
Published in C Magazine (Issue 101)
A large, low-raised, spot-lit pedestal in a dim space sits empty – while a subtly massive shadow seems to emanate from nothing on the back wall. Approaching the pedestal, guards politely tell me not to get too close. While a student sketches a spectacular and bulbous form, her pastels and charcoal sprawled around her, another viewer crouches as if to observe an underbelly detail of the piece.

Through, around, and against the document

2009
Published in Art Papers (Atlanta), Jan/Feb 2009
Patricia Reed: I became acquainted with your work with Costume Party: Colony & Native, your 2006 solo exhibition at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (NBK). Your poignant photo-collage series, Siege of Khartoum, 1884, seems particularly well suited to begin our discussion of your work’s relationship to the archival document. In this series of twenty-seven collages, you pair iconic imagery of the ongoing Iraq war with newspaper excerpts from earlier moments in history, tracing out, as you put it, the “narratives of Empire.”

What Is a Participatory Practice?

Conversation between David Goldenberg and Patricia Reed Published in Fillip Review, Fall 2008 The following conversation probes into models and the development of participatory practices. Fragments of the discussion have been culled and elaborated from issues raised during a series of online debates between practitioners experimenting in participatory practices in the Post-Autonomy chat room, November [...]

ÜBERleben

ÜBERleben, literally “Over Life”, takes us through a variety of video, installation and wall-based works located within a resurrected, gothic milieu. Four large caves for the presentation of video works were designed for the show by the architect, Nikolai Kaindl, in collaboration with curators, Sophie Hamacher and Louise Witthöft. These fractalesque architectural structures set up a self-conscious choreography of viewing, forcing the audience to manoeuvre around and through the protruding volumes.

In the Absence of Unambiguous Criteria

Rodney LaTourelle’s latest exhibition, an immersive, site specific installation titled, In the Absence of Unambiguous Criteria (2007), takes the viewer through a maze-like construction of three interlinked, striped corridors, each containing a small one-person cell of saturated colour. LaTourelle sets up a participatory mise-en-scène for people to actively navigate his matriuschka-like spaces of colour fields, transforming the typical disembodied aesthetic space of the gallery into a field of direct experience. One cannot simply gaze at a safe, intellectual distance, but must wander and slip through his sometimes narrow passageways enveloped in varying, rhythmic colour worlds.

The Momental – Curatorial Text (2006)

The Momental is a neologism, which was coined when going about the arduous task of preparing a personal statement of artistic work. The hybrid term (between the Moment and the Monumental) came about when describing an interface between a highly subjectivized temporal interval (the moment) and its’ subsequent perception as a phenomenological, albeit fleeting, ‘monument’ of sorts. When one experiences a Moment, time is stalled, alluding to the variability of time itself, shifting our mundane experience of mechanical time into a an unmeasurable realm, where duration itself is malleable.

Paul Pfeiffer in Review (2005)

Published in Neue Review, Berlin – Co-written with Erik Bünger
Paul Pfeiffer’s recent solo exhibition at Carlier | Gebauer, entitled Pirate Jenny, presents an estranged theatre of the everyday, sprawling in various forms throughout the two gallery spaces. The two spaces set up different viewing conditions; one of intimacy and the other, a more familiar distance.

Julien Rosefeldt in Review (2004)

Julian Rosefeldt’s two video installations recently presented at Kunst-Werke under the as yet unfinished “Trilogy of Failure” depict two different men in multiple states of being, constructing and deconstructing their domestic surrounding. The alter egos of each character in the works, seen simultaneously, form a comparative cinema – a viewing of divergent states, side by side. It is a doubled split where alter egos exist as dependent actors within correlative constructions, their opposing personas in dialogue with one another, co-enacting their personal meta-narratives.

CO-operative IN difference

The surfaces upon which we trace our daily trajectories are experienced as a solid, certain foundation, the concrete sidewalks carved for us acting as our interface with the urban environment. With each step we connect with the rigid surface that resists our plunging force, propelling us further in movement. The solidity of ground experienced daily, silently absorbing the traces of our lived, entangled, geometries of passage. Each step pulsates with our micro-world vector tracing and path making without any perceptible echo from underneath.

Patricia Reed