INITIAL COMPONENT OF LOST AND FOUND CITY


AN EXHIBITION PROJECT CURATED BY GRADUATE STUDENTS AT THE CENTER FOR CURATORIAL STUDIES, BARD COLLEGE

OPENS ON JANUARY 27, AT CUCHIFRITOS IN NEW YORK CITY

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. - Inaugurating the exhibition project Lost and Found City—curated by 10 graduate students at CCS Bard— the Italian artist Lara Favaretto sites her work Oggetti Smarriti (Lost and Found), at Cuchifritos in New York City, on view from Saturday, January 27, through Saturday, February 3.

Favaretto’s work consists of a suitcase, contents unknown, left alone in the gallery space, that invokes a scene of abandoned personal belongings, traveling, trafficking, and the presumed dangers associated with unattended baggage in public spaces. The suitcase project was initiated in 2005 when Favaretto learned about a state-run company that organizes auctions for unclaimed “lost and found” items from the Italian railway system. She was intrigued when she realized that homeless people were buying suitcases for a few euros without any knowledge of their contents—personal belongings either sadly lost or easily forgotten by their original owners. The project began when Favaretto attended one of these auctions and purchased a suitcase.

In her installations, performances, films, and photographic work, Favaretto creates situations and atmospheres that are in continuous metamorphosis, and that gain power in relation to the viewers’ memories and experiences. Viewers are invited to participate in the process of creating meaning for, and stories about, the objects. Favaretto’s improvisatory work invokes a magic realism, in which the unconscious and the dreamlike proliferate in positive and negative encounters with the real.Favaretto’s suitcase piece migrates from Cuchifritos to the Storefront for Art and Architecture in March, where it will be recontextualized with the works of the other artists participating in Lost and Found City: Caitlin Berrigan & Michael McBean, Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), Jonah Freeman, Mark Koven, LURE, Mads Lynnerup, Jill Magid, Costa Vece, and Stephen Vitiello. The exhibition opens at the Storefront for Art and Architecture on Saturday, March 3, and is on view through Saturday, March 24. There will be also be a performance at Orchard in early March (date to be announced).

More about Lost and Found City
Lost and Found City is an exhibition project that reflects upon how space is claimed in cities. CCS Bard graduate students Lauren Benanti, Daniel Byers, Vincenzo de Bellis, Anat Ebgi, Edith Tyler Emerson, Milena Hoegsberg, Sabrina Locks, Nicole Pollentier, Terri Smith, and Niko Vicario developed Lost and Found City in their first-year practicum, supervised by Joshua Decter, an independent curator and CCS faculty member.

For this project, emphasis is placed upon various phenomena within areas of New York City, such as Nolita and the Lower East Side. The individual exhibition components occur at different times and locations, including at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, Cuchifritos, and Orchard. Exhibition participants reflect a diversity of artistic and cultural practices, including fictional, autobiographical, analytical, politically/socially engaged, poetic, and psychogeographic responses to urban life.

The project examines the intersection of private and public settings, as well as the metaphorical “owning” of locations based upon personal events. The relationship between the private urban narratives that we invent is compared to the constant flux of the city at large. Where do history and memory intersect? How does subjectivity map itself onto community? The project seeks to connect the urban present to the past, articulating cycles of dispossession and reclamation within city space. This pattern is symbolic of the city’s continuous losing and finding of itself, including its citizens’ gains and losses in relation to the cultural, economic, and political systems of a particular metropolis. The New York urban environment, for example, is characterized by an accelerating privatization of public space, as well as by gentrification and development that perpetrate an antihistorical and impersonal experience of neighborhoods. Lost and Found City proposes that there is a continuous oscillation of loss and gain within urban flux, and is a dramatic interplay between winners and losers in terms of power: political, economic, and subjective. That which is lost is usually reactivated and repurposed within urban space, for better and worse.

The Storefront show comprises a number of newly commissioned and modified works that reactivate the space, including recorded olfactory tours of the urban environment created by Caitlin Berrigan and Michael McBean, designed for visitors to remap and renavigate Nolita and the Lower East Side; architectural/urban investigations and pedagogical projects of CUP (Center for Urban Pedagogy); Jonah Freeman’s imaginary megabuilding as city; a new outdoor urban projection/intervention by LURE (Aaron Igler plus collaborators); Mark Koven’s real-time, live-feed interactive/participatory work that explores history, geography, and the claim of territory; Mads Lynnerup’s performative-video infiltrations of other people’s navigations of the neighborhood’s streets; Jill Magid’s performance about her metaphorical seduction of a New York City police officer in the subterranean environs of the subway system; Costa Vece’s flags made of a bricolage of discarded clothing that contest national/local identities; and Stephen Vitiello’s sound installation that creates a provocative interpenetration of city and nature.

For further information about the exhibition, visit the website www.bard.edu/ccs/lostandfoundcity, call 845-758-7598, or e-mail ccs@bard.edu

About Cuchifritos

Location: 120 Essex Street between Delancey and Rivington, New York City
Exhibition Hours: Monday through Saturday, noon to 5:30 p.m.
Located at Essex Street Market, Cuchifritos is an art gallery/project space that focuses on contemporary art as it relates to community, social issues, and public space. It aims to act as a forum for exploring fundamental ideas, issues, and concerns associated with the Lower East Side through the medium of contemporary art, to highlight the work of underrepresented artists, including artists from this and similar communities. Chuchifritos is a program of the Artists Alliance Inc. For more information call the gallery at 212-598-4124 or visit www.aai-nyc.org/cuchifritos.

"Please join us on Saturday evening, February 3rd, 4-6pm, to informally bid farewell to Lara Favaretto's suitcase piece as it leaves Cuchifritos on the way to the Storefront for Art and Architecture."

About Lara Favaretto
Born Treviso, Italy, 1973. Lives and works in Turin, Italy.

Solo Exhibitions (selected):
2006 Galleria Franco Noero, Turin, Comincio ch’era finita (It Began While It Was Already Over), Galerie Klosterfelde, Berlin. 2005 I poveri sono matti Castello di Rivoli Museo d’arte contemporanea, Rivoli, Tutti giù per terra (Everybody Down on the Floor), Galerie Klosterfelde, Berlin 2004 Galleria Franco Noero, Turin 2003 Art34 Basel, Art Statements, Galleria Franco Noero.

Group Exhibitions (selected):
2005 Ecstasy: Recent Experiments in Altered Perception, MOCA, Los Angeles (USA); Longtime, Trafò, Budapest, XIV Quadriennale d'Arte, Palazzo delle Esposizioni di Roma, Rome. 2004 VideoZone2 - The Second International Video Art Biennal in Israel, Tel Aviv; Swiss Institute - Contemporary Art, New York (USA) 2003 Nuit blanche, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, Europalia, Bruxelles; Forse Italia, S.M.A.K., Gent; Studio Program 2002/ 2003, P.S.1, New York (USA); As Heavy as the Heavens, Kulturzentrum bei den Minoriten, Graz; Kunsthallen Brandts; Klæderfabrik, Odense.

About the Center for Curatorial Studies

Location: Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
The Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture at Bard College (CCS Bard) is an exhibition and research center dedicated to the study of art and exhibition practices from the 1960s to the present day. The Center’s graduate program is specifically designed to deepen students’ understanding of the intellectual and practical tasks of curating exhibitions of contemporary art, particularly in the complex social and cultural situations of present-day urban arts institutions. With state-of-the-art galleries, an extensive library and curatorial archive, and access to the remarkable Marieluise Hessel collection of more than 1,700 works, students at the CCS Bard gain both an intellectual grounding and actual experience within a museum. For further information, call the Center for Curatorial Studies at 845-758-7598, e-mail ccs@bard.edu, or visit www.bard.edu/ccs.

About Storefront for Art and Architecture

Location: 97 Kenmare Street, New York City
Exhibition Hours: Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Founded in 1982, Storefront for Art and Architecture is a nonprofit organization committed to advancing innovative positions in art, architecture, and design. Its program of exhibitions, events, and publications is intended to generate dialogue and collaboration across geographic, ideological, and disciplinary boundaries. Storefront’s distinctive facade is regarded as a contemporary architectural landmark. Commissioned in 1993 as a collaborative building project by artist Vito Acconci and architect Steven Holl, it consists of 12 panels that pivot vertically or horizontally to open the length of the gallery onto the street. The project blurs the boundary between interior and exterior and creates a multitude of possible facades. For further information call Storefront for Art and Architecture at 212-431-5795, e-mail info@storefrontnews.org, or visit www.storefrontnews.org.

About Orchard

Location: 47 Orchard Street, New York City
Performance: Date to be announced
Orchard is a cooperatively organized exhibition and event space in New York’s Lower East Side. The gallery is run by twelve partners, including artists, filmmakers, critics, art historians, and curators. The partners of Orchard have been variously associated with the New York experimental film and video scenes, institutional critique, ’90s non-yBa practices in Britain, and political conceptualist traditions in North and South America. They do not have a univocal position on their working methods or on art. Orchard’s cooperative framework and resulting exhibition program reflect dialogues among its members, their practices, and their social, geographical and artistic conditions and contradictions. For more information call the gallery at 212-219-1061 or visit www.orchard47.org