The Multiple eXposure Project is a multimedia, multi/trans/inter-disciplinary artistic practice and research-based initiative that explores the many layers of image-making, participatory photography, visual ethnography, and performative encounter(s) between the image and the spectator; the subject and the viewer. As what the name of the project implies, this endeavor is profoundly interested in the notions of the “multiple” and the “exposure” both in their literal and symbolic sense.
Firstly, The Multiple eXposure Project seeks to examine the multiple potentials of image-making or photography (digital and analogue; still and moving) as a medium, a performance, and an instrument of social engagement and (ex)change, and the overlapping of it with other disciplines. As part of its exploration, this project involves a series of visual, photographic or lens-based workshops in collaboration with non-profit, grassroots volunteer groups. The concept of the multiple is also applied under the framework of collaborative work – of bring together multiple individuals with multiple philosophies into a plurality of shared experiences.
Secondly, The Multiple eXposure Project is equally drawn to the idea of “exposure” (subjection, experience, vulnerability, coverage, documentation, and so on) in the process of socially-engaged image-making that exposes what needs to be exposed; clarifies the obscure; and concerns itself with a gamut of critical questions and discursive issues of representation.
Through image-making, we aim to expose and get exposed.
Public Interrogation: Outside the White Cube (December 1-31, 2015)
Public Interrogation:
Outside the White Cube
Organized by The Multiple eXposure Project
www.themultipleexposureproject.co.nr
Location: Public Spaces, Metro Manila, Philippines
Date: December 1-31, 2015
December 1-2 (8pm-10pm): EDSA Avenue cor. Kamuning Rd. Quezon City
December 5 (7pm-9pm): Ayala-Paseo Pedestrian Underpass, Makati City
December 13 (6pm-7pm): Alabang-Montillano Footbridge, Muntinlupa
Public Interrogation:
Outside the White Cube is an alternative, traveling, curatorial project that features image-based works across different disciplines and media by emerging artists whose works discuss the notion of the “public” and its complexities.
What is public? What counts as public? The “public” is a multi-layered concept defined differently depending on how the term is used and framed. It is a notion devoid of singularity and is, grammatically speaking, a terrain of contradictions. As a noun and an adjective, the public constitutes the people, masses or community, and suggests anything that is staged, accessed, or seen out in the “open.” The public can also be used as a verb to describe something one does, as in make public or publicize, suggesting the movement or shift from the inside (private) to the outside (public). Paradoxically, however, the same term also points to the limits of such openness and movement. Given that it simultaneously refers to something “involving and provided by the government”, the public is always at risk of becoming merely an apparatus of the sovereign state and its institutions, thus making the flow of its production, distribution, and consumption partial and counterproductive.
Public Interrogation:
Outside the White Cube seeks to re-frame the practice of curating and spectating images outside the exclusionary, institutional borders of the “white cube” or gallery space. Public spaces are used as an exhibition site to stimulate a mode of spectator experience that revolves around displacement of the passersby (public) from their “habitus” by interrupting the flow of pedestrian traffic. We alter a familiar public space and transform it into an unusual, dialogic site for image projection and exhibition, taking advantage of its accessibility and site-specificity in order to redefine the ways the spectators look at and engage with images. Adopting “guerilla urbanism” as a curatorial strategy, we make sense of the immediacy of the “public” and reflect upon its context, meanings, and intersections with representation, place, and discourse. In so doing, we intervene and reformat aspects of the urban landscapes and emphasize the “counter-spectacle” in art viewing and appreciation. This project also underlines the inherent ephemerality of an open-to-the-public display in relation to time and space. As a “traveling” exhibition which heavily depends on projection technology and public space as its “frame” or “canvas", this project celebrates the momentary nature of image-viewing, consumption, and mobility in the metropolis at a time of constant flux and transition.
Video Arts
Borders - Anne Murray (USA)
The Separation Loop - Leyla Rodriguez (Germany)
Gnomonicity - Amitesh Grover (India)
36&71 - Anthony Stephenson (USA)
Sully - Marbella Carlos (Canada)
You See Davis - Rembrandt Quiballo (Philippines, USA)
Untitled (Sleeping People in a Train) - Hannah Reber (Germany)
Into the labyrinth - Geordy Zodidat Alexis (France)
The Safest of Hands - Clint Sleeper (USA)
Hunt/Find - Dani Salvadori (UK)
Leaving My Skin - Ellen Wetmore (UK)
Presence of Absence - Matt Lee (India)
Untitled – Mohammad Namazi (UK, Iran)
Still Images / Photographs
Right Time Right Place - Robert Rutoed (Austria)
Peripheral Strangers - Julie Dawn Dennis (UK)
De Staat (The State) - Maarten Tromp (Netherlands)
Ruinophilia - Anna Garrett (UK)
Circling the Square - Arturo Soto (Mexico)
The Spectator, the Viewer, the Observer and the Perceiver –
Francine LeClercq (USA)
Magic Rooms - Carlos Collado (Spain)
Date of Consumption - Lita Poliakova
Street Photography - John Robert Luna (Philippines)
Walls - Elena Efeoglou (Greece)
Fitting Room – Megan Mace (South Africa)
Street art you can take home (for free) - Lorenzo Bordonaro (Portugal)
Victim – Solomon Eko (Nigeria)
Performance Videos / Public Interventions
Balloon Performance - Louise Winter (UK)
Somarts Mural Dance - Johanna Poethig (USA)
Unpatentable Multitouch Aerobics - Liat Berdugo (USA)
Disclaimer at Manchester Art Gallery - Laura Gower (UK)
Sustaintability – Dani Lamorte and Veronica Bleaus (USA)
Animations / Digital
Job Interview - Dénes Ruzsa and Fruzsina Spitzer (Hungary)
In Between - Sofia Makridou, Theodora Prassa (Greece)
Decadence of Nature - Olga Guse (Russia)
AsianGirl N40°42'54.488" W73°59'30.313" - Victoria Elle, Rocky Li, and Jennifer Mehigan (USA)
Get Featured in our Blog!
We are currently expanding the content of our blog and we would like to feature multidisciplinary/multimedia artists, photographers, image-makers, visual artists, performers, and so on, their portfolio, artistic practice, and research interests. The feature section serves as a virtual, archival gallery and a platform for free promotion. This call is open to all artists – individuals or groups; amateur or professional – anywhere in the world.
If you think your works are relevant to The Multiple eXposure Project, send your artist statement, sample of your portfolio, photos, videos, press releases, and other related materials to themultipleexposureproject@gmail.com.
Moving Still: The Multiple eXposure Project Zine 2.0
The sophomore issue of The Multiple eXposure Project zine has been uploaded! You can read the e-zine at ISSUU or download the PDF version HERE.
New media and video artists included in the publication are as follows:
Jessica Buie /
Liat Berdugo /
Laura Hyunjhee Kim /
Nicola Hands /
Tony Radin Jacobs /
(c) merry /
Talia Link /
Justin Zachary /
Adrian Errico /
Matteo Pasin /
Jean-Michel Rolland /
Manasak Khlongchainan /
Boris Contarin /
Hüseyin Çife /
Suman Kabiraj /
Patrick Moser /
Francesca Fini /
Aaron Oldenburg /
Benjamin Grosser/
You Qi /
Dénes Ruzsa /
Fruzsina Spitzer /
Fran et Jim /
Amelia Johannes /
Heidi C. Neubauer-Winterburn /
Jess, Lau Ching Ma /
Scott F. Hall /
Eleni Manolaraki /
Elise Frost
Harrison Banfield
Jack Rees /
Daehwan Cho /
Wu Siou Ming /
Masako Ono /
Bárbara Oettinger
I
n this sophomore issue of the Multiple eXposure Project zine,“Moving Still”, we feature a heterogeneous breed of new media and video artists whose experimental and provocative works emphasize the potency of “videos” or “moving images” in the exploration and expansion of self-representation in the discursive flow of transmission and mediation – from the screen to the spectator; and the perceptive to the conceptual.
Selected artists here make use of the “screen” as medium and performance space. By displaying, curating, and performing in front of the screen, self-image-formation is enacted while relying on playful encounter with unknown spectators in order to weave different webs of interpretation. In this regard, the screen operates as an intermediary in the artist’s performance that brings connections to identities, personal narratives, history, everyday politics, and imaginaries.
The symbiotic relationship between the screen and the subject cultivates the construction of an image or spectacle that is consumed – temporally and spatially - in a doubling of intermediation. They deflect and reflect a plethora of shifting, hybrid pretexts about ourselves within the digital ecology where the delineating lines between the public and the private; the human and the mechanical; and the material and the virtual boundaries become blurred.
Given their hyperreal structure, these video performances, visual interventions, and recorded choreographies trigger a mode of mediated encounter that heavily manipulates moments of reality – of space and time. Intimacy and presence are concomitantly altered as these pieces can be incessantly scrutinized by the gaze of many anonymous viewers floating in the digital currents, allowing us to re-locate the individual and re-think about the concept of selfhood more fluidly.
Self-as-Subject: The Multiple eXposure Project Zine 1.0
We are pleased to announce that the very first issue of the Multiple eXposure Project zine is now accessible online! You can read the e-zine at ISSUU or download the PDF version HERE. Feel free to share!
Below is the list of contributors (artists and writers) included in the publication:
J.D. Doria /
Dr. Sayfan Giulia Borghini /
Aldobranti /
Olga Sidilkovskaya /
Ana Rita Matias /
Anne Paternotte /
Rudi Rapf /
Leigh Anthony Dehaney /
Laura Knapp /
Jennifer van Exel /
Derya Edem /
Arushee Agrawal /
Utami Dewi Godjali /
Çağlar Uzun /
Mahmoud Khattab /
Noel Villa /
Dawn Woolley /
Teresa Ascencao /
Kalliope Amorphous /
Katrina Stamatopoulos /
Gaspard Noël /
Florian Tenk /
Petra Brnardic /
Sana Ghobbeh /
Alonso Tapia-Benitez /
Libby Kay Hicks /
Agent X /
Rina Dweck /
Yoko Haraoka /
Claire Manning /
Pietro Catarinella /
Anne Beck /
Gabriel Orlowski /
Ralph Klewitz /
Anthony Hall /
Alessandro Martorelli /
Robin Gerris /
Carol Radsprecher /
Veronica Hassell /
Daniela Olejnikov /
Jayson Carter /
Nathaniel St. Amour /
Jonathan Armistead /
Piotr Boćkowski
"Who are you?” “Who am I?” “Who do I think I am?” “What am I made of?” There is nothing simple about such inquiries as they pose a number of phenomenological and ontological issues.
To ask yourself or someone about self-definition is to deal with its vicissitudes and fluidities, oscillating between the ego and the alter ego; the naturalistic (Hume) and the metaphysical (Kant); and the reflexive perception of one’s body and the relational introspection with the “Other.” The self is, arguably and fundamentally, a complicated subject matter. It is an ever-evolving object, a corporeal being, an affective body, a precarious entity, a discursive phenomenon, and so forth.
Divided into three interrelated chapters, this zine features oeuvres by artists and writers from different localities around the world and, as what its theme implies, is an exploration of the “self” and its manifold permutations – its presence, identity, representation, liminality, and (dis)embodiment - in this day and age of digitality, hypermobility, and hyperreality.
In Chapter 1, The Self as I/Other, authors reflect on the dialectics between the ego and the alter ego and the multitude of ways the “self-as-subject” is defined by both internal and external contingencies, or philosophically speaking, by the binaries – “I” vs. “not-I.” Many of these selected pieces are visibly entangled with the act of self-mirroring, which is inherently reflective and performative: it involves the constitution of subjectivities based on visual imaginary reflected on the mirror that does not necessarily resemble the complex structures of the material body. What I highlight here is the notion of self-perception (internal) in relation to one’s experiences and the (external) world. As Anthony Giddens puts it, “A person's identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor - important though this is - in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. The individual's biography…cannot be wholly fictive. It must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing 'story' about the self.” (54).
In Chapter 2, The Fetishized Self, we see interconnected self-representations that examine the convergence of idiosyncratic fantasies with the phantasmagoria as an offshoot of the fetishized commodity. When I refer to the term, phantasmagoria, I emphasize the volatile strings of imaginations through which the public and the private dimension of identity becomes obscured, blurring the demarcating lines between reality and fantasy. This section functions as a provocation of the fetishization of self and the centrality of the individual as authority. Through role-playing, the self, as a fetish object imbued with power and discourse, becomes an agency displaying and interrogating the politics of gender, sexuality, identity, and bodily desire.
Finally, in Chapter 3, The Fragmented Self, the fragmentation of identity framed within the digital, virtual, or hyperreal context is explored. Featured works here represent the various modes the anonymity, simulation, multiplicity, and control in data superhighway allow the transformation of the self into fragmented, hybrid subjects. The concept of “self-fragmentation” also revolves around the nature of post-modernism: the absence of absolute truth and the presence of disembodied self.
Bibliography:
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity, 1991.
The Grey Art Gallery at New York University announces the first major museum retrospective of works by Tseng Kwong Chi (1950–1990), a prolific artist and key documentarian of Manhattan's downtown scene in the 1980s.
On view April 21 through July 11, 2015, the exhibition features over 80 photo-based works alongside archival materials by the Hong Kong–born Canadian artist, who died in 1990 at the age of 39 from AIDS–related complications. In addition to twelve works from the artist's best-known East Meets West and Expeditionary series, as well as nine images of his close friend Keith Haring's drawings in New York city subways, Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera presents over 60 examples from less well-known bodies of work. These include Costumes at the Met; photographs of South Jersey lifeguards and partying beachgoers at Jacob Riis Park; his biting critique of the politically conservative Moral Majority; "It's a Reagan World!," a commission from Soho Weekly News; portraits of notable artists; group portraits of East Village denizens; rubber-stamped Polaroid photomontages; and digitized snapshots of the artist's fellow night-clubbers.Performing for the Camera is co-organized by NYU's Grey Art Gallery and the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. Amy Brandt, McKinnon Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Chrysler, curated the show, which is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated publication featuring four essays that illuminate the many facets of Tseng's work, his all-too-brief life, and his influence on younger artists.
In combining photography with performance, personal identity with global politics, and satire with farce, Tseng created a compelling body of work whose complexity is belied by its easy humor and grace. Tseng's inclusion in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass, on view May 7–August 16, 2015, will help to contextualize his work's relation to fashion and identity politics. That show will address the Chinese splendor in Western imagery, exploring the cultural issues inherent in "East Meets West" that Tseng tackled in his work. "Until now, the critical understanding of Tseng's multifaceted oeuvre has been limited by the few works, mostly from the East Meets West series, that have been on public view," notes Brandt. "Art audiences have not had the opportunity to take in the full scope of Tseng's powerful imagery, with its striking social, political, and philosophical implications, nor to appreciate his impact on younger generations of artists. The exhibition's subtitle, Performing for the Camera, emphasizes the aspects of masquerade, theatricality, and performance at the root of his conceptual photographic practice. With this exhibition, we are proud to carve a niche for Tseng Kwong Chi in the pantheon of postmodern innovators, where he so rightly belongs."
Tseng, whose parents fled Communist China to settle in Hong Kong, was born in 1950. When he was sixteen years old, his family relocated to Vancouver. After studying briefly at the University of British Columbia, Tseng moved to Paris in 1974 to attend the prestigious Académie Julian, where he began to seriously study photography. After moving to New York in 1978, Tseng began crafting the performative self-portraits that form the backbone of his artistic practice. "Tseng was simultaneously mindful of art-historical precursors and way ahead of his time," said Grey director Lynn Gumpert. "His self-portraits are prescient in anticipating today's 'selfie' culture, and art history has finally caught up with him in recognizing his party persona as a sophisticated performance of identity. At NYU's art museum, we are excited to spotlight these issues, which will resonate with so many of the university's students. The show also fits squarely into the Grey's commitment to exposing multifarious stories of downtown New York, as well as to presenting multidimensional artistic perspectives from outside the western canon."
For his landmark East Meets West series, which he began in 1979—and which evolved into The Expeditionary Series—Tseng adopted the identity of a visiting Chinese official, wearing a deadpan expression and a "Mao suit." Describing himself as both an "ambiguous ambassador" and an "inquisitive traveler," he assumed the role of a dedicated tourist crisscrossing the globe, always an outsider in a foreign land. These strikingly formal yet performance-based images feature the artist posing before popular tourist sites, such as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, or Mount Rushmore, and in magnificent natural settings such as the Canadian Rockies and the Grand Canyon. By embarking on his own version of a Grand Tour, Tseng was determined to find and identify what was quintessentially American. In another guise, he was an eager and reliable witness to his time, documenting not only his friend Keith Haring's subway drawings but also downtown New York's lively art and nightclub scenes of the 1980s.
Tseng's genius for performance allowed him to act as a social chameleon, insinuating himself with great poise into nightclubs, art openings, beach parties, and posh society evenings. He snapped innumerable Polaroids of himself with attendees as they entered these events, soliciting the autographs of friends and celebrities alike, which he assembled into dense photomontages stapled onto board. These dynamic montages, which have rarely been seen, display the artist's interests in series and groupings, and are a highlight of the Grey's presentation. In all the photographs portraying these social encounters, Tseng's immutable costume and Asian identity mark him as an outsider. "Ironically, while Tseng stood out in his images in his guise of Chinese dignitary—and, in most cases, the only Asian in the room—his Mao suit allowed for a certain acceptance into social and political circles," observes Brandt. "In exaggerating his difference into an exotic mystique, Tseng found a way to infiltrate spaces typically closed to Asians and other minority groups."
Tseng's stereotyped Chinese bigwig borrows from downtown New York's love for masquerade and glitter—and reaches a new height of absurdity—in his Costumes at the Met series, which was published in the Soho Weekly News in 1980. Armed with his Mao suit and his performer's charm, Tseng insinuated himself into the exclusive reception for The Costume Institute's exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Manchu Dragon: Costumes of the Ch'ing Dynasty, 1644–1912, which was organized by Diana Vreeland. The exhibition brought together one hundred and fifty lavish imperial robes worn by emperors and empresses of the Ch'ing dynasty. Then called "Party of the Year," the reception was attended by more than six hundred guests at three hundred dollars a ticket. As Tseng wandered around the gala, his assistant Dan Friedman snapped photographs of him standing next to major figures from the worlds of art, politics, and fashion—such as Paloma Picasso, Henry and Nancy Kissinger, and Yves Saint Laurent. This series clearly demonstrates how the artist inserted questions of geopolitics and cultural fetishism into the show's glam and glitter.
Dancer and choreographer Muna Tseng, the artist's sister, recalls that her brother enjoyed social gatherings of all kinds. This is seen not only in the social subterfuge of his Costumes at the Met photos, but also in rarely exhibited images of the artist laughing and cavorting with beachgoers at New York's Jacob Riis Park, and crashing a lifeguards' ball in Wildwood, New Jersey. Though Tseng's uniform remains constant—as does his outsider status—the artist reveals a different side of his persona in these photographs. His demeanor is more relaxed and playful, more suited to the casual social atmosphere of these occasions.
For his little-known 1981 Moral Majority series, also published in the Soho Weekly News, Tseng shed his Mao uniform for a genteel seersucker suit, adopting the guise of a conservative sympathizer amid members of the then-ascendant Republican party. With artist Kenny Scharf as his assistant, Tseng convinced famous figures of the Reagan era to pose in front of a heavily wrinkled American flag. In so doing, he anticipated Sacha Baron Cohen, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart's parodies of television hosts, journalists, and other interviewers, which have become an indispensable feature of our present media landscape. The cheeky satire of the Moral Majority series echoes the fashion photos Tseng shot for a 1980 article in the Soho Weekly News, "It's a Reagan World!," a collaboration with his friend Ann Magnuson. For these photographs, artist friends such as Jack Smith, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Magnuson herself take on the guise of young Republicans, dressing in conservative drag. Their ironic, punked-out take on preppy style suggests fashion's power to effect political critique, a constant theme in Tseng's practice.
In 1979, the suit Tseng wore still evoked the policies and pervasive presence of Communist leader Mao Zedong, who died in 1976. Today, Western notions about the distance and mystery of China, as conveyed by the artist in the 1980s, have evolved into a new set of stereotypes and associations, as the world's second-largest economy has become a major US trading partner. In our present economic environment Tseng's images are more relevant than ever before, given China's current status as a global superpower. In the 1980s Chinese artists such as Ai Weiwei, Zhang Huan, and Song Dong, who had learned about Tseng's photographs through American art magazines, made Chinese politics a subject of their work. Despite the cultural changes that have taken place since then, today, as this exhibition demonstrates, Tseng's art personifies the idea of "East Meets West" as powerfully as it did in the 1980s.
Exhibition Publication
Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera is accompanied by a beautifully illustrated 178-page publication with an introduction and four essays exploring Tseng's work, his place in the downtown scene, and his importance for contemporary artists who also address the nexus of identity, politics, and performance. Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, opens the volume with her thoughts on Tseng's place in art history and the significance of the present exhibition. The exhibition's curator, Amy Brandt, PhD, McKinnon Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Chrysler Museum of Art, provides a broad overview of Tseng's art, discussing the various series that comprise his oeuvre. Brandt also unpacks current theories surrounding tourism as an activity and cultural phenomenon in relation to Tseng's work, noting that in his guises of Chinese dignitary and inquisitive traveler, he is a double outsider—exploring both his Asian identity and his marginal status as a gay man. Finally, she looks at Tseng's impact on a number of contemporary artists who are inspired by his groundbreaking photographs.
In his essay "On Infiltration," Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, Assistant Professor of Performance Studies, Northwestern University, investigates the guerrilla-like performance tactics that Tseng consistently employed. Discussing the artist's brilliant Costumes at the Met series, Chambers-Letson elaborates on how Tseng—amidst prominent fashion designers, socialites, and other celebrities at the 1980 Chinese-themed gala at The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute—convincingly played the part of a "potentially authentic signifier of Chineseness." Tseng's consistent strategy of "infiltration" is, Chambers-Letson concludes, "a keystone of his insurgent aesthetics." Alexandra Chang, Curator of Special Projects and Director of Global Arts Programs, Asian/Pacific/American Institute, New York University, in her essay "Epic Journey: Tseng Kwong Chi in the Diaspora," situates Tseng among Asian American artists who were actively exploring issues of identity and activism in the 1980s, as well as among Chinese avant-garde artists then living in New York City. She also reflects on the "multiple art histories" embedded in his work. For example, she observes that while the small, meditative figure seen from a distance in many of his Expeditionary Series images triggers associations with works by northern European Romantic artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, they also strongly recall the tiny, reclusive figures deep in contemplation amid mountainous landscapes often found in traditional ink paintings made by Chinese literati.
Finally Muna Tseng, who now oversees Tseng's estate, reminisces about her rambunctious, fashion-conscious, cross-dressing older brother, who entertained the family, directing theatrical productions featuring his siblings and cousins. According to Muna, Tseng was also a child prodigy who quickly mastered the basics of Chinese calligraphy and traditional ink painting. Through these five authors' original research and new perspectives, this handsome book offers unparalleled insights into the world of one of the late 20th century's most underappreciated artists. Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera is a definitive and indispensable artist's monograph. Published by the Chrysler Museum of Art and the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, in association with Lyon Artbooks, the volume is available through the Grey Art Gallery for $50.00.
Exhibition Tour
After closing at the Grey Art Gallery on April 21, 2015, Performing for the Camera travels to the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, where it will be on view from August 18 to December 13, 2015. From January 21 to May 22, 2016, the show will be on view at the Tufts University Art Gallery at the Shirley and Alex Aidekman Arts Center. The tour concludes at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, on view from September 17 to December 11, 2016.
Sponsorship
Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera was curated by Amy Brandt, McKinnon Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, and co-organized by the Chrysler Museum and the Grey Art Gallery, New York University. This exhibition is supported, in part, by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. The Chrysler Museum thanks Oriana McKinnon and the McKinnon Family. The Grey Art Gallery gratefully acknowledges the Shiseido Endowment; New York University's Visual Arts Initiative; the Grey's Director's Circle, Inter/National Council, and Friends; Jane Wesman Public Relations; and the Abby Weed Grey Trust. In-kind support is provided by Peter Mustardo of The Better Image and Katherine Sanderson, photograph conservator.
About the Grey Art Gallery
The Grey Art Gallery is New York University's fine arts museum, located on historic Washington Square Park in New York City's Greenwich Village. It offers the NYU community and the general public a dynamic roster of engaging and thought-provoking exhibitions, all of them enriched by public programs. With its emphasis on experimentation and interpretation, and its focus on exploring art in its historical, cultural, and social contexts, the Grey serves as a museum-laboratory for the exploration of art's environments.
Exhibitions organized by the Grey have encompassed all the visual arts: painting, sculpture, drawing and printmaking, photography, architecture and decorative arts, film, video, and performance. In addition to producing its own exhibitions, which often travel to other venues in the United States and abroad, the gallery hosts traveling shows that might otherwise not be seen in New York and produces scholarly publications that are distributed worldwide.
General Information Grey Art Gallery, New York University 100 Washington Square East, New York, NY 10003 Tel: 212/998-6780, Fax: 212/995-4024 E-mail: greyartgallery@nyu.edu Website: www.nyu.edu/greyart Hours Tuesday, Thursday, Friday: 11 am–6 pm OPEN LATE Wednesday: 11 am–8 pm Saturday: 11 am–5 pm Sunday, Monday, and major holidays: Closed Admission: Suggested donation: $3; NYU students, faculty, and staff: free of charge
The Multiple eXposure Project is run by a small group of image-makers, visual artists, and researchers coming from different backgrounds, with a wide range of interests.
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The Multiple eXposure Project incorporates theory and practice in image-making and publishes zine and scholarly articles, essays, stories on photography and visual narratives.
Collaboration with individuals and groups coming from different disciplines and backgrounds is of utmost importance at The Multiple eXposure Project especially in the workshops, exhibitions, and other projects. We underscore the potency of shared, ethical, participatory artistic process and accordingly of collaborative authorship by incorporating dialogical, performative interaction into image-making, bridging the gaps between the subject and the medium.
We curate our works in physical and digital configuration, applying methodologies on photo curation (of still and moving images) that are wide-ranging, alternative, experimental, and non-paradigmatic. To be specific, we delve into the concepts of photo curation, not just as praxis of selection or organization of images, or an archival method, but as a social intervention.
One of the crucial components of The Multiple eXposure Project is its practical initiative framed within the context of volunteerism, participation, and engagement. We believe in the collective power and benefits of sharing one’s skills and expertise with those who need them. We provide free photographic workshops, in cooperation with non-profit organizations, which are aimed at empowering marginalized individuals through photography or image-making.
PUBLICATION
The sophomore issue of The Multiple eXposure Project zine has been uploaded! You can read the e-zine at ISSUU or download the PDF version HERE.
Description: In this sophomore issue of the Multiple eXposure Project zine,“Moving Still”, we feature a heterogeneous breed of new media and video artists whose experimental and provocative works emphasize the potency of “videos” or “moving images” in the exploration and expansion of self-representation in the discursive flow of transmission and mediation – from the screen to the spectator; and the perceptive to the conceptual.
New media and video artists included in the publication are as follows:
Jessica Buie /
Liat Berdugo /
Laura Hyunjhee Kim /
Nicola Hands /
Tony Radin Jacobs /
(c) merry /
Talia Link /
Justin Zachary /
Adrian Errico /
Matteo Pasin /
Jean-Michel Rolland /
Manasak Khlongchainan /
Boris Contarin /
Hüseyin Çife /
Suman Kabiraj /
Patrick Moser /
Francesca Fini /
Aaron Oldenburg /
Benjamin Grosser/
You Qi /
Dénes Ruzsa /
Fruzsina Spitzer /
Fran et Jim /
Amelia Johannes /
Heidi C. Neubauer-Winterburn /
Jess, Lau Ching Ma /
Scott F. Hall /
Eleni Manolaraki /
Elise Frost
Harrison Banfield
Jack Rees /
Daehwan Cho /
Wu Siou Ming /
Masako Ono /
Bárbara Oettinger
The first issue of the Multiple eXposure Project zine is now accessible online! You can read the e-zine at ISSUU or download the PDF version HERE. Feel free to share!
Description: Divided into three interrelated chapters, this zine features oeuvres by artists and writers from different localities around the world and, as what its theme implies, is an exploration of the “self” and its manifold permutations – its presence, identity, representation, liminality, and (dis)embodiment - in this day and age of digitality, hypermobility, and hyperreality.
Featured artists and writers in the zine are as follows:
J.D. Doria /
Dr. Sayfan Giulia Borghini /
Aldobranti /
Olga Sidilkovskaya /
Ana Rita Matias /
Anne Paternotte /
Rudi Rapf /
Leigh Anthony Dehaney /
Laura Knapp /
Jennifer van Exel /
Derya Edem /
Arushee Agrawal /
Utami Dewi Godjali /
Çağlar Uzun /
Mahmoud Khattab /
Noel Villa /
Dawn Woolley /
Teresa Ascencao /
Kalliope Amorphous /
Katrina Stamatopoulos /
Gaspard Noël /
Florian Tenk /
Petra Brnardic /
Sana Ghobbeh /
Alonso Tapia-Benitez /
Libby Kay Hicks /
Agent X /
Rina Dweck /
Yoko Haraoka /
Claire Manning /
Pietro Catarinella /
Anne Beck /
Gabriel Orlowski /
Ralph Klewitz /
Anthony Hall /
Alessandro Martorelli /
Robin Gerris /
Carol Radsprecher /
Veronica Hassell /
Daniela Olejnikov /
Jayson Carter /
Nathaniel St. Amour /
Jonathan Armistead /
Piotr Boćkowski
Workshops
Excerpts from digital and analogue photography workshops at Koseli School, a center for slum and street children in Kathmandu, Nepal (January 2015). These participatory workshops incorporated photography with "playing" and performance.
Visual Intervention
Speech Acts and the Politics of Repetition SeriesDescription: This series explores the repetitive nature and patterns of speech acts and ritualized rhetorics of some of the world’s powerful and controversial figures by incorporating twice-recorded video footages with open-source background music.
Through the process of repetition, new meanings of the moving images and spoken texts are simultaneously (re)created. Specific words are on purpose repeated to generate a multitude of views and reviews and to deconstruct the stability of language. As a mode of visual intervention, these absurdly distorted and edited images/videos are also meant to make a dialogue with, distract, entertain, annoy, and disturb the viewers on the other side of the screen, while highlighting the intersections and contradictions between reality and absurdity; speech and power of the speaker.
Feel free to re-play and re-share!
#1 >>> Obama: You Kinda Screwed Up My Ending But That's Okay.
Video, animated gif, and stills created by Sherwin Altarez Mapanoo
Background music courtesy of einzimmersound
DIGITAL ART
Urban DomesticationDescription: An attempt to represent the psychological state of the subject who was performing to exist (and persist) as a corporate animal in the harsh and precarious dog-eat-dog world of the urban jungle.
Note: Point or click on the image to view its original version.
The Grey Art Gallery at New York University announces the first major museum retrospective of works by Tseng Kwong Chi (1950–1990), a prolific artist and key documentarian of Manhattan's downtown scene in the 1980s.
On view April 21 through July 11, 2015, the exhibition features over 80 photo-based works alongside archival materials by the Hong Kong–born Canadian artist, who died in 1990 at the age of 39 from AIDS–related complications. In addition to twelve works from the artist's best-known East Meets West and Expeditionary series, as well as nine images of his close friend Keith Haring's drawings in New York city subways, Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera presents over 60 examples from less well-known bodies of work. These include Costumes at the Met; photographs of South Jersey lifeguards and partying beachgoers at Jacob Riis Park; his biting critique of the politically conservative Moral Majority; "It's a Reagan World!," a commission from Soho Weekly News; portraits of notable artists; group portraits of East Village denizens; rubber-stamped Polaroid photomontages; and digitized snapshots of the artist's fellow night-clubbers.Performing for the Camera is co-organized by NYU's Grey Art Gallery and the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. Amy Brandt, McKinnon Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Chrysler, curated the show, which is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated publication featuring four essays that illuminate the many facets of Tseng's work, his all-too-brief life, and his influence on younger artists.
In combining photography with performance, personal identity with global politics, and satire with farce, Tseng created a compelling body of work whose complexity is belied by its easy humor and grace. Tseng's inclusion in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass, on view May 7–August 16, 2015, will help to contextualize his work's relation to fashion and identity politics. That show will address the Chinese splendor in Western imagery, exploring the cultural issues inherent in "East Meets West" that Tseng tackled in his work. "Until now, the critical understanding of Tseng's multifaceted oeuvre has been limited by the few works, mostly from the East Meets West series, that have been on public view," notes Brandt. "Art audiences have not had the opportunity to take in the full scope of Tseng's powerful imagery, with its striking social, political, and philosophical implications, nor to appreciate his impact on younger generations of artists. The exhibition's subtitle, Performing for the Camera, emphasizes the aspects of masquerade, theatricality, and performance at the root of his conceptual photographic practice. With this exhibition, we are proud to carve a niche for Tseng Kwong Chi in the pantheon of postmodern innovators, where he so rightly belongs."
Tseng, whose parents fled Communist China to settle in Hong Kong, was born in 1950. When he was sixteen years old, his family relocated to Vancouver. After studying briefly at the University of British Columbia, Tseng moved to Paris in 1974 to attend the prestigious Académie Julian, where he began to seriously study photography. After moving to New York in 1978, Tseng began crafting the performative self-portraits that form the backbone of his artistic practice. "Tseng was simultaneously mindful of art-historical precursors and way ahead of his time," said Grey director Lynn Gumpert. "His self-portraits are prescient in anticipating today's 'selfie' culture, and art history has finally caught up with him in recognizing his party persona as a sophisticated performance of identity. At NYU's art museum, we are excited to spotlight these issues, which will resonate with so many of the university's students. The show also fits squarely into the Grey's commitment to exposing multifarious stories of downtown New York, as well as to presenting multidimensional artistic perspectives from outside the western canon."
For his landmark East Meets West series, which he began in 1979—and which evolved into The Expeditionary Series—Tseng adopted the identity of a visiting Chinese official, wearing a deadpan expression and a "Mao suit." Describing himself as both an "ambiguous ambassador" and an "inquisitive traveler," he assumed the role of a dedicated tourist crisscrossing the globe, always an outsider in a foreign land. These strikingly formal yet performance-based images feature the artist posing before popular tourist sites, such as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, or Mount Rushmore, and in magnificent natural settings such as the Canadian Rockies and the Grand Canyon. By embarking on his own version of a Grand Tour, Tseng was determined to find and identify what was quintessentially American. In another guise, he was an eager and reliable witness to his time, documenting not only his friend Keith Haring's subway drawings but also downtown New York's lively art and nightclub scenes of the 1980s.
Tseng's genius for performance allowed him to act as a social chameleon, insinuating himself with great poise into nightclubs, art openings, beach parties, and posh society evenings. He snapped innumerable Polaroids of himself with attendees as they entered these events, soliciting the autographs of friends and celebrities alike, which he assembled into dense photomontages stapled onto board. These dynamic montages, which have rarely been seen, display the artist's interests in series and groupings, and are a highlight of the Grey's presentation. In all the photographs portraying these social encounters, Tseng's immutable costume and Asian identity mark him as an outsider. "Ironically, while Tseng stood out in his images in his guise of Chinese dignitary—and, in most cases, the only Asian in the room—his Mao suit allowed for a certain acceptance into social and political circles," observes Brandt. "In exaggerating his difference into an exotic mystique, Tseng found a way to infiltrate spaces typically closed to Asians and other minority groups."
Tseng's stereotyped Chinese bigwig borrows from downtown New York's love for masquerade and glitter—and reaches a new height of absurdity—in his Costumes at the Met series, which was published in the Soho Weekly News in 1980. Armed with his Mao suit and his performer's charm, Tseng insinuated himself into the exclusive reception for The Costume Institute's exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Manchu Dragon: Costumes of the Ch'ing Dynasty, 1644–1912, which was organized by Diana Vreeland. The exhibition brought together one hundred and fifty lavish imperial robes worn by emperors and empresses of the Ch'ing dynasty. Then called "Party of the Year," the reception was attended by more than six hundred guests at three hundred dollars a ticket. As Tseng wandered around the gala, his assistant Dan Friedman snapped photographs of him standing next to major figures from the worlds of art, politics, and fashion—such as Paloma Picasso, Henry and Nancy Kissinger, and Yves Saint Laurent. This series clearly demonstrates how the artist inserted questions of geopolitics and cultural fetishism into the show's glam and glitter.
Dancer and choreographer Muna Tseng, the artist's sister, recalls that her brother enjoyed social gatherings of all kinds. This is seen not only in the social subterfuge of his Costumes at the Met photos, but also in rarely exhibited images of the artist laughing and cavorting with beachgoers at New York's Jacob Riis Park, and crashing a lifeguards' ball in Wildwood, New Jersey. Though Tseng's uniform remains constant—as does his outsider status—the artist reveals a different side of his persona in these photographs. His demeanor is more relaxed and playful, more suited to the casual social atmosphere of these occasions.
For his little-known 1981 Moral Majority series, also published in the Soho Weekly News, Tseng shed his Mao uniform for a genteel seersucker suit, adopting the guise of a conservative sympathizer amid members of the then-ascendant Republican party. With artist Kenny Scharf as his assistant, Tseng convinced famous figures of the Reagan era to pose in front of a heavily wrinkled American flag. In so doing, he anticipated Sacha Baron Cohen, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart's parodies of television hosts, journalists, and other interviewers, which have become an indispensable feature of our present media landscape. The cheeky satire of the Moral Majority series echoes the fashion photos Tseng shot for a 1980 article in the Soho Weekly News, "It's a Reagan World!," a collaboration with his friend Ann Magnuson. For these photographs, artist friends such as Jack Smith, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Magnuson herself take on the guise of young Republicans, dressing in conservative drag. Their ironic, punked-out take on preppy style suggests fashion's power to effect political critique, a constant theme in Tseng's practice.
In 1979, the suit Tseng wore still evoked the policies and pervasive presence of Communist leader Mao Zedong, who died in 1976. Today, Western notions about the distance and mystery of China, as conveyed by the artist in the 1980s, have evolved into a new set of stereotypes and associations, as the world's second-largest economy has become a major US trading partner. In our present economic environment Tseng's images are more relevant than ever before, given China's current status as a global superpower. In the 1980s Chinese artists such as Ai Weiwei, Zhang Huan, and Song Dong, who had learned about Tseng's photographs through American art magazines, made Chinese politics a subject of their work. Despite the cultural changes that have taken place since then, today, as this exhibition demonstrates, Tseng's art personifies the idea of "East Meets West" as powerfully as it did in the 1980s.
Exhibition Publication
Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera is accompanied by a beautifully illustrated 178-page publication with an introduction and four essays exploring Tseng's work, his place in the downtown scene, and his importance for contemporary artists who also address the nexus of identity, politics, and performance. Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, opens the volume with her thoughts on Tseng's place in art history and the significance of the present exhibition. The exhibition's curator, Amy Brandt, PhD, McKinnon Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Chrysler Museum of Art, provides a broad overview of Tseng's art, discussing the various series that comprise his oeuvre. Brandt also unpacks current theories surrounding tourism as an activity and cultural phenomenon in relation to Tseng's work, noting that in his guises of Chinese dignitary and inquisitive traveler, he is a double outsider—exploring both his Asian identity and his marginal status as a gay man. Finally, she looks at Tseng's impact on a number of contemporary artists who are inspired by his groundbreaking photographs.
In his essay "On Infiltration," Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, Assistant Professor of Performance Studies, Northwestern University, investigates the guerrilla-like performance tactics that Tseng consistently employed. Discussing the artist's brilliant Costumes at the Met series, Chambers-Letson elaborates on how Tseng—amidst prominent fashion designers, socialites, and other celebrities at the 1980 Chinese-themed gala at The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute—convincingly played the part of a "potentially authentic signifier of Chineseness." Tseng's consistent strategy of "infiltration" is, Chambers-Letson concludes, "a keystone of his insurgent aesthetics." Alexandra Chang, Curator of Special Projects and Director of Global Arts Programs, Asian/Pacific/American Institute, New York University, in her essay "Epic Journey: Tseng Kwong Chi in the Diaspora," situates Tseng among Asian American artists who were actively exploring issues of identity and activism in the 1980s, as well as among Chinese avant-garde artists then living in New York City. She also reflects on the "multiple art histories" embedded in his work. For example, she observes that while the small, meditative figure seen from a distance in many of his Expeditionary Series images triggers associations with works by northern European Romantic artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, they also strongly recall the tiny, reclusive figures deep in contemplation amid mountainous landscapes often found in traditional ink paintings made by Chinese literati.
Finally Muna Tseng, who now oversees Tseng's estate, reminisces about her rambunctious, fashion-conscious, cross-dressing older brother, who entertained the family, directing theatrical productions featuring his siblings and cousins. According to Muna, Tseng was also a child prodigy who quickly mastered the basics of Chinese calligraphy and traditional ink painting. Through these five authors' original research and new perspectives, this handsome book offers unparalleled insights into the world of one of the late 20th century's most underappreciated artists. Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera is a definitive and indispensable artist's monograph. Published by the Chrysler Museum of Art and the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, in association with Lyon Artbooks, the volume is available through the Grey Art Gallery for $50.00.
Exhibition Tour
After closing at the Grey Art Gallery on April 21, 2015, Performing for the Camera travels to the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, where it will be on view from August 18 to December 13, 2015. From January 21 to May 22, 2016, the show will be on view at the Tufts University Art Gallery at the Shirley and Alex Aidekman Arts Center. The tour concludes at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, on view from September 17 to December 11, 2016.
Sponsorship
Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera was curated by Amy Brandt, McKinnon Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, and co-organized by the Chrysler Museum and the Grey Art Gallery, New York University. This exhibition is supported, in part, by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. The Chrysler Museum thanks Oriana McKinnon and the McKinnon Family. The Grey Art Gallery gratefully acknowledges the Shiseido Endowment; New York University's Visual Arts Initiative; the Grey's Director's Circle, Inter/National Council, and Friends; Jane Wesman Public Relations; and the Abby Weed Grey Trust. In-kind support is provided by Peter Mustardo of The Better Image and Katherine Sanderson, photograph conservator.
About the Grey Art Gallery
The Grey Art Gallery is New York University's fine arts museum, located on historic Washington Square Park in New York City's Greenwich Village. It offers the NYU community and the general public a dynamic roster of engaging and thought-provoking exhibitions, all of them enriched by public programs. With its emphasis on experimentation and interpretation, and its focus on exploring art in its historical, cultural, and social contexts, the Grey serves as a museum-laboratory for the exploration of art's environments.
Exhibitions organized by the Grey have encompassed all the visual arts: painting, sculpture, drawing and printmaking, photography, architecture and decorative arts, film, video, and performance. In addition to producing its own exhibitions, which often travel to other venues in the United States and abroad, the gallery hosts traveling shows that might otherwise not be seen in New York and produces scholarly publications that are distributed worldwide.
General Information Grey Art Gallery, New York University 100 Washington Square East, New York, NY 10003 Tel: 212/998-6780, Fax: 212/995-4024 E-mail: greyartgallery@nyu.edu Website: www.nyu.edu/greyart Hours Tuesday, Thursday, Friday: 11 am–6 pm OPEN LATE Wednesday: 11 am–8 pm Saturday: 11 am–5 pm Sunday, Monday, and major holidays: Closed Admission: Suggested donation: $3; NYU students, faculty, and staff: free of charge
Rhizome - Rhizome is dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.
ArtsHound - Leading online resource for Arts and Cultural information in Houston and Galveston Texas
Art Deadlines List - Newsletter listing of art contests and competitions, art scholarships and grants, art jobs and, internships, juried exhibitions, call for entries, etc.
The Written Word - Social network for writers, publishers and book lovers
Contemporary Performance Network - A social network/community organizing platform providing artists, presenters, and scholars a platform to meet, share work, and collaborate.
The Multiple eXposure Project is a multimedia, multi/trans/inter-disciplinary artistic practice and research-based initiative that explores the many layers of image-making, participatory photography, visual ethnography, and performative encounter(s) between the image and the spectator; the subject and the viewer. As what the name of the project implies, this endeavor is profoundly interested in the notions of the “multiple” and the “exposure” both in their literal and symbolic sense.
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