Surface Tension_Los Angeles

The exhibition focuses around questions pertaining to the built environment, with a specific focus on Los Angeles. Following the question - What remains of a building divided into equal parts and distributed for reconfiguration? - participating artists will explore the role architecture plays in defining relationships in the city: How does the particular architectural environment of LA contribute to forms of social exchange? What local historical forces have led to the conditions of the built and how do such histories continue to position or locate the body? What architectural tensions might be teased out to initiate dialogue across the urban fabric? Forms of spatial intervention, imaginary building projects, and appropriations and poetic modifications to the built environment will feature as methods for developing sited inquiry. From such a perspective, participating artists will question existing patterns of the built environment within Los Angeles while seeking to occupy, through forms of performance and intervention, the sites of examination.

Surface Tension_Copenhagen

Working from the viewpoint that artistic practice may lend itself to fashioning new perspectives on social relations, Surface Tension_ Copenhagen brings together practitioners from varied geographies and disciplines to undertake collaborative projects that seek to engage the city of Copenhagen. The exhibition extends from a past exhibition, Surface Tension_Curitiba, held in Curitiba Brazil in January 2006. Driving this series of exhibitions is the intention to examine local urban conditions through creative work by inviting multiple viewpoints onto the local from both residents of the city as well as visitors. In this regard, the exhibition aims to stimulate an exchange between local artists and international visitors, so as to generate and question methods of working relationally, understandings of local conditions, and the urgencies around building strategies.

Surface Tension_Curitiba

Continuing work being produced and explored through the Surface Tension publications, artists/editors Ken Ehrlich (Los Angeles) and Brandon LaBelle (Copenhagen), will meet in Curitiba, Brazil, to collaborate with local artists Octávio Camargo and Guilherme Soares. Collaborations will be based on exploring the city of Curitiba, as an environment, thereby fostering an exchange between local understanding and foreign perspective: how each meet to negotiate observations and interpretations about the city and its activities, structures, inhabitants and rituals. Research will lead to investigations of urban infrastructures, from home environments to electrical power, local cultures to practices of minor production. The collaborations will result in the exhibition of works and the presentation of events, such as cooking performances and radio broadcasts.
How might a model of working on site incorporate the limits or resistance of the site itself?