Logbook Entry #12

Posted on December 14th, 2014 by Cleo Smits

These last weeks of the semester have proven to be quite tumultuous. I sent out an update to each artist/group I had been researching and interviewing,  listing all of the other artists that I was considering for the exhibition about two weeks ago. I received a reply from Monira Al-Qadiri saying that she had reservations about being in a show with Gulf Labor and that she thought the GCC Collective would feel the same way. We agreed to meet while she was here for the FIND conference. We met this past week and I explained how the work of both collectives fits into the concept of the exhibition in differing ways that would make for a very interesting dialogue. I went through a different methods of how to give both groups’ work the same amount of respect- so that they can enter into this dialogue I want instead of negatively influencing the audience’s understanding of the work.

I wanted to make it clear that I was sure these works could both exist in the show as very different examples of institutional critique and that I would be able to place them and explain them such that they would be understood through their contexts. I explained that I was going to be able to have walls installed in the space and that the works didn’t have to visually intersect, so that they are only tied through the concept itself in the audience’s mind. I also mentioned that if the fear was more of having their names associated with one another, the publication materials for the exhibition could be kept ‘in-house’ and not be available publicly. Another option was to keep both her Myth Busters series and the Gulf Labor group’s work, but to only use interviews with the GCC group/ mention them in my writing.

Monira explained to me her reluctance was because even though she knew and was friends with many of the artist in the Gulf Labor group, she didn’t necessarily agree with their methods and she felt they they misread her and the GCCs work. However, when I left our meeting, I felt good about conversation and felt like she was considering how to work through this. Now, however, I received an email from her explaining that she can no longer participate in the exhibition because she will be too busy in March, because she ultimately feels that I have misread her work, and because she thinks including the Gulf Labor group is too much of a risk. So by inference, this also means that the GCC group will no longer be participating.

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Logbook Entry #10 & 11

Posted on November 28th, 2014 by Cleo Smits

This post is covering the past two weeks (Nov. 14th-28th):

This week our meeting was positive and felt productive, as I was able to bring the model of the Project Space (made by Sam Faix, NYUAD Art Gallery’s Head of Installations) and my first layout proposal with the all the possible artworks I might want to use to-scale to the model. It was really helpful to have this model at our meeting because I was able to walk my mentors through the ideas behind my first draft of a layout to show how using this model and thinking about the works in the space pushed my thinking about the works and the exhibition itself. I also was involved in setting up an exhibition in the space last week (Night Light: an exploration of light and dark) and I gained a familiarity with the space and it’s problems/limitations.

It was wonderful, however, to hear that by March the space will have temporary walls as that will make the space a lot more flexible and opens me up to a lot more possibilities. We spoke about the possibility of putting walls to make an ‘S’ traffic flow pattern, and the placement of a table either in the center of the gallery or near the entrance on the left side of the door. It was also mentioned that I would be able to put a wall so that it is the first thing a visitor sees- and it would have the main wall text for the exhibition.

Salwa put me into contact with Doris Bitar from the Gulflabor group, and we have begun emailing back and forth- I am sending her more detailed interview questions to respond to.

We spoke about the Gulflabor 52 weeks project and how I might be able to simply print out each week on an A4 sheet of paper and fill the wall in a grid- 5 rows of 10. This would make sense than selecting a few of the weeks as examples, because it would show the project as a whole. There could be a key included in the brochure with all the details for the works. One thing I am not sure about with this idea, however, is how to represent the weeks that were videos- have a monitor and show them one after the other? Or have film stills (and the info from the brochure would direct people to be able to watch them online)?

I also had a skype interview with Babak Golkar, and he said that I would have to go through the gallery to have the work in the exhibition. Unfortunately, the recording did not work (which I didn’t realize until after the interview), but I will be sending an update along to the gallery detailing the project and asking specifically about the works I would want in the show.

The GCC responded to my questions- although these responses are actually from Barrak Alzaid.

These are the latest texts I read:

• Crabapple, Molly. “Slaves of Happiness Island.” (August 4th, 2014): n. pag. Web.

• “Saadiyat and the Gulf Labor Boycott.” Ibraaz. N.p., n.d. Web.

• Simon Sheikh: Notes on Institutional Critique
• Douglas Crimp: AIDS: Cultural Analysis/ Cultural Activism (recommended by Deb to help clarify relationship between activist art and institutional critique)
• Obrist, Hans-Ulrich author. Ways of Curating. Penguin Group, 2014. Print.

I have updated my annotated bibliography to include notes from the above reading.

I also redrafted my intro for the Exhibition Catalogue Essay.

This week my goal is to:

• Have another draft of my Catalog intro + write further
• have another layout- this time with the movable walls in mind
• send an update to the artists with the progression of the exhibition, the other artists involved + details (the date has moved to the week of March 29th)- still hoping I can have the space for 2 weeks
• with the new date, I need to update my timeline
• I have to start thinking of a title
• READ: Chaplin, Elizabeth. Sociology and Visual Representation & Exhibition Experiments

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Logbook Entry #9

Posted on November 14th, 2014 by Cleo Smits

This week I was working on assignments for the capstone seminar as well as on my capstone. For the seminar, we had to write and make a video artist statement (for which I made a curatorial statement). This assignment was quite difficult because my curatorial statement could not simply be an explanation of the exhibition concept (like a usual curatorial statement/video). Instead, I had to make something more in line with an artist statement- so I had to describe my curatorial practice and what kind of curator I am (or want to be, since I have never done this before!).

Last Saturday I went to the Shrajah Art Foundation and attended the GCC artists’ talk event with Reem Fadda. I was not able to interview them there, but I was able to meet them and they explained that they prefer to answer questions in writing so that they can discuss the answers as a collective (only 3 of the members were in Sharjah- Khalid Al Gharaballi, Aziz Al Qatami, and Barrak Alzaid). I updated the questions I had already sent them into a new list and I’m now awaiting their response.

This week I made a prioritized reading/task list that I will be continually updating, and I finished the transcription from my interview with Serkan Özkaya. I met with Maya about  model and she showed me how to properly scale my images to fit the model so that I can start laying out the exhibition (even with works that are not confirmed). This will really help me to understand how the works relate to each other and to the concept of the exhibition. For next week I need to make a list of all the works I might possibly want to include so that I can start making possible layouts.

I also wrote the first draft for the introduction to my exhibition catalog essay (which will be my final capstone essay). I will be redrafting the introduction and writing the next section- the historical background of institutional critique- for next week.

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Logbook Entry #7-8

Posted on November 3rd, 2014 by Cleo Smits

I skipped writing a logbook last week, so this entry is covering the past 2 weeks.

I had a finalized Deed of Gift which was approved and then sent to Serkan Ozkaya (who has now signed it) and Monira Al Qadiri in preparation for our interview (which took place October 23rd). This interview was very productive as Monira agreed to have the Myth Busters series of photographs in the exhibition. We spoke about the possibility of enlarging the photographs, but as they are made from rather low-quality images (most are architectural renderings) they will not do very well at a larger size. I also feel that by keeping them at their current size, I might be able to include more of them (the series contains 9 total). We also spoke about the possibility of printing the photographs here- which she will actually be able to decide in person as she will be here for the Find conference (she is arriving December 6th). This will also really be great to be able to look at the exhibition space with her there and to speak in person. I am still working on transcribing this interview as well as finishing the transcription from Serkan Ozkaya’s interview. Through email, Serkan has agreed to showing reproductions of the Dear Sir or Madam series. These are thus far the only confirmed works.

Babak Golkar had to push back our interview to this Thursday, November 6th, because he was traveling and in Tehran. I have already sent him interview questions as well as introduced my project and intention to include him in the exhibition.

I have been in contact with Aziz Al Qatami from the GCC Collective about speaking about their work and the possibility of including them in the exhibition, something I touched upon during the interview with Monira Al Qadiri as she is also one of the members. She had informed me that most of the works on view currently at the Sharjah Art Foundation have already been sold, and so one of the only works I might be able to exhibit is a video work, something I hope to discuss further with Aziz. There is an artist talk this Saturday, November 8th at the Sharjah Art Foundation on their exhibition with Khalid Al Gharaballi, Aziz Al Qatami, Barrak Alzaid and Amal Khalaf. I am trying to make sure I can attend, as this will be the most effective way to speak to them.

I have had multiple conversations this week about how to go about contacting the Gulflabor group, to speak about their art projects and explore how to potentially include them in the exhibition. I spoke with Debra Levine about how not including them seems like an exclusion resulting from not wanting to deal with them. Their project is so relevant to my topic, that I really do want to include them in some way- at least for now this means reaching out and speaking with them about their work. I also spoke to Justin Stearns (as Deb had suggested) as he knows about the group through his involvement with labor issues. He told me about specific articles I should be familiar with. I briefly spoke to both Maya and Salwa about my desire to include them and about how I feel unsure about the best way to contact them (through one artist or through the group’s email)- something we will discuss in our weekly meeting.

Things I am working on:

• updating  my ideal checklist
• transcriptions (Serkan Ozkaya + Monira Al Qadiri)
• gathering all the works from Gulflabor’s 52 weeks project to better understand how it might be included
• beginning the writing for the exhibition catalogue essay (which will be my final capstone 10 page essay)- starting by outlining the intro
• I am continually re-drafting and editing my focus questions
• organizing my bibliography and list of readings into a prioritized reading schedule

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Logbook Entry #6

Posted on October 19th, 2014 by Cleo Smits

During our weekly meeting we discussed my focus questions and one of my tasks for the week was to edit them and refine them further. For many of my answers it is a matter of rearranging them to clearly define my primary and secondary goals. The focus statement questions have helped narrow down my concept and made me have to be clear in my explanation on my concept. It is also helping me to figure out exactly what questions I  am asking in this exhibition.

I have continued to try and get in touch with Walid Raad, but my contact has not responded.  In the meantime, I found Jalal Toufic’s The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster  which Walid Raad has used as the foundational theory for his Scratching on Things I Could Disavow  series. I am going to hold off on reading this, however, until I know if I will even be able to interview Raad, as I still have many other readings to focus on.

I have continued to read through the OnCurating.org publications on curating critique and institutional critique. This week another task of mine is to transcribe my interview with Serkan Ozkaya. Our capstone seminar this week was about interviewing and I am preparing an official ‘Deed of Gift’ form for my interviewees to sign (I will still send it to Ozkaya even though it is after the fact). I am to interview Babak Golkar hopefully this next week (he was traveling this week, but I sent him the list of questions I will be working with so he can read them ahead of time). Monira Al-Qadiri also had to cancel a time we had sent up and was traveling, so we are working on setting up a new time to have a skype interview this week.

My most important task this week is making an ideal checklist of works- because I am still unsure which artists will actually want to participate in the exhibition, I think the best way to do this is to create ideal combinations of works (without taking into consideration whether or  not the artists will actually participate). This exercise will help me to understand how my exhibition concept will come through with the works of the artists I have been speaking to.

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Logbook Entry #5

Posted on October 12th, 2014 by Cleo Smits

I attended the opening at The Third Line of The Return Project– by Babak Golkar and found that this series is very much in line with my investigation of contemporary institutional critique. Golkar is essentially critiquing the art market of the contemporary art world- here is an essay about the exhibition. I spoke briefly with the artist during the opening, and he agreed to talking about my capstone project. I am to email him with my questions as he is traveling at the moment.

I had a skype interview with Serkan Ozkaya, which I made an audio recording of- and need to transcribe at some point. I will most likely use the questions I compiled before this interview with the other artists.

I have begun to read:

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Logbook Entry #4

Posted on October 5th, 2014 by Cleo Smits

This week I worked on answering the focus statement questions, and on creating a framework to illustrate the structure of my capstone project. I found that the best platform to organize my thoughts visualize and be able to move them around easily as I organized them was to use Prezi. I created a Prezi as a way to answer Deb’s request after our meeting to explain the underlying framework of my project. It is organized into three main sections: research (‘Curatorial Research’ and ‘Artist Research’), the resulting ‘Exhibition’, as well as the ‘Exhibition Catalog’ / resulting text / material/documentation.

I also read the following this week:

1.  “What Happened to the Institutional Critique” by James Meyer
2.  “From the Critique of the Institution to an Institution of Critique” by Andrea Fraser

I met with Vasilis Molos, who is teaching the Humanities Capstone Seminar with Martin Klimke about how I can use their syllabus to help support my project on the research side of things- for example as I did by doing the focus statement assignment.

I got positive responses from Serkan Ozkaya and Monira Al-Qadiri who said they would speak with me. Ozkaya is going to set up a skype time with me, and Monira Al-Qadiri is traveling at the moment, so I can wait until she is back or email her my questions.

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Logbook Entry #3

Posted on September 28th, 2014 by Cleo Smits

This week I able to get a workstation in A6 assigned to me for my capstone desk, which I have already found helpful as a place to keep all my books and notes and be able to begin mapping out ideas. It helps to have a desk to come to so that I actually work during the day as well.

This week I worked on writing a draft of an exhibition proposal to try articulate a more narrowed down topic. I used the exhibition proposal for the opening show of the NYUAD Art Gallery. Here is how my proposal narrowed down my topic:

Summary of Curatorial Premise

 Untitled is an exhibition exploring the use of institutional critique in contemporary art addressing the Gulf region specifically. The artworks included in the exhibition explore cultural peculiarities and habits that have emerged from the region’s ‘hyper-modernity’, as well as the implications of the recent boom in building branches of art museums in this modernity and its effect on the history of art in the Arab world.

Through the works of Walid Raad and the artist collective GCC, this exhibition will raise questions about our neighbors- the art institutions being built on Saadiyat- as well as similar projects in the larger Gulf region. What does this trend of museum building reveal about the development of a contemporary art world in the Gulf and its now imminent interaction with institutions? How do these artists address this forthcoming interaction and how do their works reveal anxiety about resulting narratives and representation of art in the Arab world in these institutions? Both the GCC and Walid Raad (in his ‘Scratching on Things I could Disavow’ series) focus on the future in this region and its interaction with and effect on art.

After meeting with my mentors, we discussed how I had potentially begun to limit myself by narrowing the topic this way. We spoke about thinking about institutions at large- about how to define institutions in a broader sense (not just as museums). In order to help me keep streamlining my concept, I agreed to complete the ‘focus statement’ that the students in the Humanities Seminar completed as an assignment. We also spoke about how high-profile Walid Raad is an artist and how to get in touch with him- I have a contact at The Third Line who was working before at the Sfeir-Semler Gallery (which represents him in Beirut). I will try to be put in touch this way first. I also need to begin contacting artists to see if they will speak with me about this topic and their artwork.

I met with Deb Levine this week about the Gulf Labor group and how I was not sure what kind of role they might be able to play in the exhibition. One fear is the possibility of them taking this exhibition as an opportunity to further their goal of forcing the Guggenheim AD to comply with their petition outlining fair labor, in a way that is detrimental to my capstone project or even the university. We spoke about how I might be able to include them not necessarily through the art in their 52 Weeks project, but perhaps more through the exhibition text, or even to exhibit some of their own texts. Deb also pushed me to create a framework of my topic as a way to clarify my concept.

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Logbook Entry #2

Posted on September 21st, 2014 by Cleo Smits

I requested a space to work on my capstone, as I realized this is something that will help me to spread out my capstone work throughout the week. It needs to be a separate space dedicated only to this project so that I can really focus on it. I got this idea because in the Practice Seminar, the visual arts students can request personal studios and the theater students can reserve rehearsal studios, so I figured I could at least use one of the many empty desks near professors’ offices (for example in A6).

This week I have worked on narrowing down my topic for the exhibition, as it was still a bit broad. I began by looking at my list of artists I had been considering and thinking about which ones spoke to me the most, and why. My mentors pushed me to make a list of my ideal 3, and even a secondary list, and from there explain the topic. By narrowing down to three artists, inherently there will be themes and more specific questions that rise to the surface. This week I focused my artist research on:

• Walid Raad (specifically his Scratching on Things I Could Disavow series)
• The Gulf Labor group
• The GCC Collective

Here is a link to the content I gathered on Raad and the GCC Collective. After researching the Gulf Labor group, I began thinking that they might be a good idea to include- for one their artwork does not really work with the work of Raad and the GCC Collective- it is much more along the lines of poster-art (think Gorilla Girls). Can their art/ project fit into the institutional critique category if it is so clearly activist art?

I realized that the link between these thee artists/artist groups was their focus and criticism on the region. Raad and the Gulf Labor group focus specifically on the museums being built on Saadiyat Island. Looking at artists who are looking at, questioning, and criticizing our neighboring institutions (as well as our very own institution at times) made me realize that I am also questioning our role (as NYUAD) here, in this particular context. How do we/ have we faced the labor issue? How do we engage with the art world here, and now that we have a gallery here, how does contemporary institutional critique relate directly to our context here- as a western institution in the Gulf, in the UAE, and as an institution involved in the arts?

I also looked back at my final paper I wrote for my Foundations of Art History II course I took last semester. This paper traces institutional critique historically and discuses the newest phase of institutional critique- in contemporary art. I used quotes from this essay to create a timeline to keep in mind as I research artists and analyze their work.

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Logbook Entry #1

Posted on September 15th, 2014 by Cleo Smits

This first week for our capstone seminar we read most of The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde. In our class discussion, we spoke about the gift exchange market Hyde writes about and how our capstones- and the research and creation process behind them- engage with Hyde’s idea of the gift.

Our first assignment was to chart how we structured and scheduled our work (capstone-related, course-work related, meetings, etc.) over the course of a week. While the ‘time map’ I created was perhaps affected by the fact that this was the first week of classes, I noticed a trend of doing capstone-related work over the weekend, and not carrying through work through the week. My main goal moving forward was to try and spread this out so that I am working at least a little bit on my capstone every day.

I also met with Glenn Wharton, my professor for Intro to Museum Studies who gave me bibliographies for curating contemporary art and social practice art to use in my research. Additionally, I began to go through some books I had taken out of the Bobst library:

Obrist, Hans-Ulrich. Ways of Curating. New York: Penguin Books, 2014. Print.

Obrist, Hans-Ulrich. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Curating but Were Afraid to Ask. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011. Print.

Rand, Steven. Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating. New York: apexart, 2010. Print.

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