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

“Post-Speculation, Act II” 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

This implicit merging of closeness and distance, reality and story, sets the stage for Post-Speculation, Act II, a group exhibition building upon the conditions left by Act I. The exhibition opens with Sarah Oppenheimer’s reactivation of her 2012 façade installation at P!, C-010100. Like other aspects of the show, Oppenheimer’s work plays on the reversal of temporal sequence, restoring the gallery windows to a mirrored condition from two years ago. Similarly, Josiah McElheny continues his series of “collaborations with dead artists” that result in temporary and site-specific works. For Act II, he speculates on how Blinky Palermo (1943–1977) might restage one of his monotonal murals in the New York gallery space, responding to both the physical environment and other artworks. Peruvian-born, Berlin-based artist Gabriel Acevedo Velarde presents Ciudadano Paranormal (2013), featuring video interviews with state employees regarding their encounters with the “ghosts” of government institutions. The video is accompanied by fantastical drawings that reflect on the Modernist architecture where these encounters have allegedly occurred. With a sensitivity keenly attuned to translating the ever-shifting present, Lynn Hershmann Leeson’s Synthia (1999–2004) uses real-time financial data to control the movements and mood of a fictional female character as she wanders the city. European art and design collective Åbäke presents a series of photograms and glass cubes produced in collaboration with Finnish glass-blowing icon Oiva Toikka. The resulting series, A History of the World (2014), abstractly represents events spanning the history of the universe, from the Big Bang to Heat Death. The photographs from Amie Siegel’s Black Moon / Hole Punches (2010) series trace parallel time within post-apocalyptic science fiction and the 2008 economic recession and housing crash. At an accompanying event in October, Siegel will screen her short film Black Moon (2010) at The New School in conversation with the exhibition curators. Finally, Walid Raad presents Section 88: Act XXII_Views from Inner to outer compartments (2010), which is part of the project Scratching on things I could disavow. Shown for the first time in New York, these floor-to-ceiling photographic strips hide miniature architectural details that become literal and metaphorical thresholds to access new spaces and experiences. Through this combination of site-specific installations, real-time explorations, and otherworldly dimensions, the exhibition itself becomes a speculative playing field for the interactions of objects and ideas.