October 24 - November 21, 2020
A semi-annual biennial event, curated by the artists Michael Mazurek, Stephen Lapthisophon and Jesse Morgan Barnett.
From the organizers:
““I’ve written this against a background of both reckless optimism and reckless despair. It holds that Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism The DALLAS BIENNIAL is pleased to announce DB20 which will take place at the artist run project space PRP in Dallas, TX.
The exhibition will feature a selection of works by the artists Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pope.L, Dorothea Lange, Tala Madani and Keith Walsh. Curated by the artists Michael Mazurek, Stephen Lapthisophon and Jesse Morgan Barnett, DB20 will examine issues surrounding disenfranchisement, human rights and activism through the lens of historical cultural revolution, artistic production and resistance.
DB20 will take place at PRP in Dallas, Texas, from October 24-November 21, 2020, opening by appointment the week before the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957 – 1996) was an American artist (born in Cuba) and lived and worked in New York City between 1979 and 1995 until his death in 1996 from AIDS-related causes. He began his art studies at the University of Puerto Rico before moving to New York City, where he attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, first in 1981 and again in 1983. He received his BFA from Pratt Institute, New York, in 1983 and his MFA from the International Center of Photography and New York University in 1987. From 1987 to 1991, Gonzalez-Torres was a member of the artist collective Group Material, whose collaborative, politically-informed practice focused on community engagement and activist interventions. He employed simple, everyday materials (stacks of paper, puzzles, candy, strings of lights, beads) to address themes such as love and loss, presence and absence, rejuvenation, gender and sexuality, and permanence through change. According to some scholars, Gonzalez-Torres’s aesthetic project can relate to Bertolt Brecht’s theory of epic theater, in which creative expression transforms the spectator from an inert receiver to an active, reflective observer and motivates social action, thus asking allowing viewers to participate in establishing meaning in his works.
Pope. L is a visual artist and educator whose multidisciplinary practice uses binaries, contraries and preconceived notions embedded within contemporary culture to create art works in various formats. Building upon his long history of enacting arduous, provocative, absurdist performances and interventions in public spaces, Pope. L applies some of the same social, formal and performative strategies to his interests in language, system, gender, race and community. The goals of his works are several: joy, money and uncertainty—not necessarily in that order. Dorothea Lange (1895 – 1965) was a seminal American documentary photography. Best known for her Depression-era images, she compassionately captured the squalid conditions of the people most effected by poverty and displacement.
In the midst of the Great Depression, Lange brought her large Graflex camera out of the studio and onto the streets. Her photos of the homeless and unemployed in San Francisco’s breadlines, labor demonstrations, and soup kitchens led to a job with the FSA. From 1935 to 1939, Lange’s arresting FSA images—drawing upon her strength as a portrait photographer—brought the plight of the nation’s poor and forgotten peoples, especially sharecroppers, displaced families, and migrant workers, into the public eye. Tala Madani was born in Tehran, Iran in 1981. Her work skewers stereotypes in her sharply satirical paintings that evoke clashes of culture: men and women, the rational and the absurd, Western and non-Western. Madani’s figurative paintings often feature a riotous cast of middle-aged men, balding and stocky, whose libidinal mayhem wreaks havoc on any situation the artist thrusts them into. Acerbic caricatures of both machismo and a childlike desire for mischief, the physical comedy at work in Madani’s paintings is anchored by intense pleasures, pathos, and a pervasive sense of violence. In Madani’s work, slapstick humor is inseparable from violence and creation is synonymous with destruction, reflecting a complex and gut-level vision of contemporary power imbalances of all kinds.
Keith Walsh focuses upon unity through the historic connections of socialist activism and black liberation activism in the USA, and particularly, Los Angeles. His work includes extensive historical research, often used to produce artworks consisting of flow diagrams and well as text-based associative connections to the present. The associative word constructions are determined by how the intersection of historical tendencies, pivotal dates, or entities may be positioned according to the semantics or poetics of a ‘political line’.
About The Dallas Biennial
http://dallasbiennial.org/
Directed by Michael Mazurek and Jesse Morgan Barnett, The DALLAS BIENNIAL (DB) is an artist run organization that looks to the format of the international art survey as a means to advocate art production and investigate exhibition and curation. Each biennial is titled DB, followed by the year of its launch.
About PRP
https://prp.agency/
PRP [purp] is an artist-run permanent research project based in Dallas, TX founded by Michael Mazurek and Pierre Krause. It provides artists with an environment to conceptualize, produce, and exhibit their work while seeking to establish a critical setting for investigation, experimentation and thoughtful discourse.”
Permanent Research Project (PRP)
508 Fabrication St.
Dallas, 75212 Texas
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