Bertille Bak, an artist living and working in Paris, has been developing for more than a decade a practice that centres on observing societies, understanding the organisation between individuals, highlighting their personal and collective histories, traditions and folklores, their hobbies and revolts. Working in collaboration with community groups, she constructs narratives between fiction and documentaries where poetry and utopias usurp the simple assessment of a situation or site…

Repeated attempts to dismantle the aura of value and rarity surrounding art objects have been, for the most part, unsuccessful. Why is that? The majority of these attempts throughout the twentieth century have consisted of infiltrating the economy of care, custodianship, conservation, and considered attention granted to art objects upon entry into the art establishment. While the introduction of impostors into this ecosystem in the form of real-world doubles (such as Duchampian readymades) served to short-circuit the aura of authenticity within spaces of art, over time these impostors nevertheless began to perform the function of ritualizing a general sense of disbelief with ...

Sitting at home, you dream of living in places you barely know. And yet, you feel like a tourist in your own city. Maybe you should get out more. But when you do go out, you barely recognize anything. It’s a problem: everything important happens somewhere else. You are more attached to political struggles and events in other places. All the food you eat is imported. All your closest friends and family have moved away to live or work in countries where they don’t speak the language. You might as well join them, but then again that’s what brought you ...

This group exhibition brings together artworks and objects to trace various transformations of meaning, reception, and use over time. The titular metaphor of the whale’s belly—a mythic space separated from lived reality—plays on the residual legacy of the white cube as an allegedly bracketed space of reflection, contemplation and perceptual or political transformation. Just as Jonah, who in the biblical account was swallowed by a whale, and perhaps the visitor, are transformed through isolated meditation, In the Belly of the Whale plays content against its framing to question both how an artifact references a given historical moment and how different modes ...

In the summer of 2011, 699 New Yorkers received fines for having standing water in their birdbaths. In a news story about the surprised city dwellers who had unwittingly violated the New York City Health Code’s Article 151 (covering pest prevention and management), the paradoxes inherent in accounts of maintaining yet controlling “nature” within urban environments were near-farcical. Residents who wanted to attract birds to their properties were also inadvertently breeding mosquitoes, which can carry disease—West Nile, in this case—and are not just a nuisance, but also a potential public health threat. Eliminating the birdbaths prevented the breeding of insects, ...