NYAB Event - “Post-Speculation, Act I” Exhibition

“Post-Speculation, Act I” Exhibition

P!

This event has ended.

Post-Speculation begins where Speculation, Now ends: as a postscript, a footnote, an addendum, and a reflection of a book that does not yet exist. In an age of geopolitical upheaval, unstable financial markets, environmental uncertainty, and distributed artistic production, Post-Speculation explores the fringe, the edge, and the double-bind of this broad topic.

“Speculation” is often associated with financial markets and defined as measuring investment risk against future returns. At the same time and in its original usage, “speculation” is the creative leap of looking both beyond and within the known in order to imagine something unexpected. In this context, speculation is a framework for action and thought that can be constructive in a historic moment of radical change and uncertainty. Ironically, the concrete environment of the exhibition setting provides the foil to engage in such provocative questioning

The exhibition begins with Post-Speculation, Act I. For eleven days, the art collective HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? will occupy P! in order to launch thewayblackmachine.net, an internet archive of activism around black embodiment inspired by The Wayback Machine (web.archive.org). Addressing contemporary conditions such as police brutality, American-funded international violence, and the ways that memes and hashtags collapse and make legible such threats to personhood, the collective’s conceptual and spatial intervention uses the gallery itself as a medium that extends into the street. Designed by A(n) Office with HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, Act I will feature multiple screens, projections, black walls, and void space. Through performances and architectural maquettes, multiple operations are modeled on and for theHouse Opera | Opera House, a found/acquired house in Detroit that places art at the center of the community and offers community members a space to create.