Winter 2024 Openings

Join us for an opening reception celebrating R.I.P. Germain: Avangarda, In Practice: Claudia Pagès, and Small World Cinema.

R.I.P. Germain: Avangarda
Jan 25–Mar 25, 2024

SculptureCenter is pleased to present the first exhibition in the United States of R.I.P. Germain. UK-based, R.I.P. Germain investigates how structures of exclusion lead to the creation of para-institutional spaces, practices, and modes of sociality and solidarity. His practice explores how a lack of access to financial, legal, and other forms of state-sanctioned resources foment support systems that respond to the needs of underserved and excluded communities.

In New York, R.I.P. Germain will present a series of newly commissioned sculptures in the guise of facades and storefronts. R.I.P. Germain’s presentation will expand his recent explorations of “false fronts”– or spaces that present themselves in one way but function in another. Offering an appearance of banality, they frequently mask an illegal operation. Liminal and precarious spaces of trade, the fronts also run as spaces of care and sociality. These engineered facsimiles represent amalgams of frontages for “baggy spaces” (as coined by the artist and the activist-curator Helen Starr), places “found in every city, governed by their own logics — market and moral, they function as ways to serve a community need that otherwise remains unmet.” These conditions generate specified ways to access and operate within them that cut across typical social hierarchies and stratification. In hyperlocal terms that interrogate what it means to be “in the know,” R.I.P. Germain’s work asks whether such semi-secrecy produces community, reproduces the destructive dynamics of the outside world, or allows for other systems of sociality and value to develop.

In Practice: Claudia Pagès
Jan 25–Feb 19, 2024

Claudia Pagès’s work circulates word, body, music, and movement in multiple directions, tracing the continuity of logistics systems (like shipping and transport) alongside legal language and proceedings in hypnotic video installations. Pagès refers to the subjects of her work as “containment architectures,” upholding power through the flow of goods and capital. Pagès’s new work for SculptureCenter is a video installation sited between two locations that mark the “birth of bureaucracy” – ancient caves tallied with trade markers and the paper's entrance to Europe through the Silk Route.

Small World Cinema
Jan 25–Mar 25, 2024
In collaboration with Taipei Fine Arts Museum, SculptureCenter welcomes Small World Cinema, a presentation of moving image works from the Taipei Biennial 2023 – Small World, to New York City.

“Small World,” the theme of the 13th edition of the Taipei Biennial, suggests both a promise of greater control over one’s own life, and a threat of isolation from a larger community. As the curators suggest, our world can become smaller as we grow closer to one another, but also as we grow apart, and Taipei Biennial 2023 – Small World takes place within such a suspended state.

Divided into four programs and spread across SculptureCenter’s lower level galleries, Small World Cinema includes works made between 1989 and 2023 by Tekla Aslanishvili; Yin-Ju Chen; Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze; Samia Halaby; Li Yi-Fan; Jen Liu; Basim Magdy; Jumana Manna; Artemio Narro; Bahar Noorizadeh in collaboration with Rudá Babau and Waste Paper Opera (Klara Kofen, James Oldham, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Anna Palmer); Ipeh Nur; Ellen Pau; Oleksiy Radynski; John Smith; Su Yu-Hsin; Wang Ya-Hui; C. Spencer Yeh; and Zhou Tao.