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00:07 Wedding?
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00:34 It has this name because it shares all these characteristics
00:38 with the biennial.
00:39 There's 50 artists from around the world.
00:42 It's a small set of exciting work going on in the world.
00:45 But what we did differently is that instead
00:48 of spreading it throughout a city as a normal biennial,
00:50 we put it all in one room.
00:51 Instead, what if we put it all together
00:52 and they all have to talk to each other
00:54 and live in really close quarters?
00:58 So it follows all the rules of the biennial,
01:00 but also we really like the idea that structures and systems,
01:04 you can use names.
01:05 Everyone can start a biennial.
01:06 Everyone can start a Kunsthalle if they want to, too.
01:08 So it's just about doing the things.
01:11 So the funny thing was that when the artists--
01:13 when we invited them, they'd call me up and they'd be like,
01:15 is this a real biennial or is this a joke?
01:18 And I would be like, yes.
01:19 I take it very seriously as that high-level exhibition that
01:22 brings all this art into a city, an art center city like Zurich,
01:27 and shows the audience that art.
01:31 But I also think that there's some fun
01:32 in playing with those giant structures
01:34 and showing how easy they are to work with or to replicate.
01:39 Right?
01:39 Yeah.
01:40 [SIDE CONVERSATION]
01:42 I mean, there's great theme exhibitions,
02:05 but there's two real problems with the theme exhibition.
02:07 One is that art is no longer art.
02:10 It's an illustration.
02:11 So it's not-- illustration is a different cultural form, which
02:14 also has value.
02:15 But you're making art illustrate something
02:18 when artists can be really ambiguous and not
02:20 sit perfectly within things.
02:21 Mostly, the most interesting art does that.
02:24 So Daniel came.
02:26 He asked me if we wanted to do a group show together.
02:29 And he was like, maybe you have thoughts
02:30 of what that show could be.
02:32 And I came back--
02:33 this was in February.
02:34 I came back a week later, and I was like,
02:35 the theme of the show is art.
02:38 Like, we just remove it, and we just--
02:41 we start looking at quality works,
02:43 works that we want to see.
02:44 Because the other problem with group shows,
02:46 theme shows, is that the curator sometimes
02:49 will put a lesser quality work in because it perfectly
02:51 illustrates a theme.
02:52 And so what happens is that then there's no--
02:56 the art is not even--
02:57 it's not based on the quality of the art or the experience.
03:00 It's based on whether this depicts something.
03:03 And I think the audience can feel that in these shows,
03:05 that it's not all the level.
03:07 So I thought, we thought, what happens
03:10 if we just go with what we want to bring in, quality, things
03:14 that look exciting, things we've heard about,
03:16 and we put them together?
03:18 And what happened was that it made its own theme.
03:21 And that theme is kind of like life now, right?
03:24 That's all of the weirdness and ridiculousness
03:27 is representative here, of making it
03:30 through the world next to each other and maneuvering.
03:34 And so that happened on its own, which
03:36 makes sense because artists are the ones reflecting on life.
03:39 I mean, it's like, you don't really
03:41 need to get between the art.
03:43 But I'm an artist, and that's how I feel, right?
03:45 So--
03:46 [LAUGHTER]
03:49 [SIDE CONVERSATION]
03:52 So Daniel and I, we get along really well.
04:17 But we don't have--
04:19 our taste in art doesn't perfectly overlap.
04:21 And I think that's actually interesting for conversation
04:23 and things.
04:24 So when we went through the artists, if we both agreed,
04:27 then they moved on to a selection.
04:29 And then, of course, it comes down
04:30 to what can we do with the resources that we have, right?
04:33 But mostly, we did it.
04:36 So there's also this overlap between two forms of taste,
04:40 two forms of interest.
04:41 And that, now, seven months later, I also
04:44 see as a form that makes it more cohesive than it
04:48 should have been.
04:49 I thought this would be much messier, much more
04:51 like just these pieces.
04:53 But actually, the artworks, artworks at the same time,
04:56 artworks around each other, they're related.
05:00 We all live in the same world.
05:02 There's not that many differences
05:03 in the basics of things, right?
05:06 The basics of society and humanity, right?
05:08 Yeah.
05:10 We've been working on it for about nine months, maybe,
05:13 eight months.
05:13 Eight or nine months.
05:14 We would meet at least once every week at the beginning.
05:17 Before we even invited one artist or anything,
05:20 we had met for a couple of months,
05:22 just talking about what could be interesting,
05:24 what kind of show might be interesting to see in Zurich,
05:27 what kind of show isn't done right now.
05:31 And that was the basics point, was these conversations
05:34 about what could be done that was more special, more
05:38 exciting.
05:39 Yeah.
05:40 That's what the whole show is about.
05:42 That's where it's birthed from.
05:43 And then it became this colossus, right?
05:47 But that's eight months ago.
05:49 I don't think either of us could have pictured it like this.
05:52 I remember some of the ideas that we
05:53 went through for weeks at a time,
05:55 and they were very different than what happened.
05:57 We live in a society, we live in a time
05:59 right now where discussion is called arguing,
06:03 arguing is thought of as being bad.
06:06 So you should just like something or not talk about it.
06:10 There's not this room for this debate, which is also
06:13 really interesting, also really intellectually stimulating.
06:16 So I think all of this is this turn against so many societal
06:24 forces that don't want to put things together,
06:26 that want everything to be in firm boxes.
06:29 And it's really interesting to bleed between them.
06:32 I mean, life bleeds between ambiguities.
06:36 There's not good or bad or right or wrong.
06:38 These are fairy tales.
06:39 Yeah.
06:40 [INTERPOSING VOICES]
06:43 [INTERPOSING VOICES]
07:13 I mean, all the art here is so exciting in the way
07:15 that it deals with many different things,
07:17 from something like this abstractions,
07:20 where the artist who's a painter who's in his 40s,
07:25 he has a career as a painter, and his sister
07:28 has a practice as a kind of a dance choreographer artist,
07:31 and she's been doing these performances.
07:33 And these three panels spaced throughout the show,
07:37 they were the backdrop and the flooring,
07:39 the set for his sister's work.
07:42 So are they props or are they paintings?
07:45 What does that mean for abstraction?
07:47 And this is really about seeing what things are.
07:50 And other works might deal with direct issues.
07:53 Or do you mind if I walk this way?
07:56 Margit Palmer, who's in her 80s and in Austria for decades
08:06 has been making these beautiful aquatints.
08:09 And they've been dealing with femininity
08:11 in very weird ways.
08:12 They're sexualized.
08:14 The women have guns.
08:16 They're very uncomfortable.
08:17 I can't really tell you one thing about this.
08:19 And I think that's what makes them exciting as art,
08:21 is that the way that they make me feel is not settled.
08:26 They don't have a point of view which tells you what to think.
08:29 They just put a series of real life images,
08:33 like more or less, and they leave it here for the viewer
08:35 to get to decide.
08:38 One of the first things that we did with the show
08:42 is that there's a queer architecture collective that
08:45 works at the ETH called Sex Kino.
08:48 It's Juan Brachia Maff and Shen He.
08:51 And they had been doing these cool projects
08:53 for the last year or two.
08:54 They did a guerrilla installation
08:57 about bathroom cruising in the hallways of the ETH.
09:00 They took over this abandoned sex kino on Longstreet
09:04 and did an exhibition.
09:05 So we invited them to be part of the show as this insert,
09:10 to include creative practices outside of high art,
09:14 contemporary art.
09:15 I think that was also something we were interested in.
09:17 So this is exploration.
09:19 I mean, they've taken all these office doors out
09:23 of a building in Basel, and they've set it up here.
09:25 And what's so strange is that the psychosis of office work,
09:31 this redundancy of how we put people in boxes,
09:34 it maintains itself without the building.
09:38 The doors themselves can convey that.
09:39 I mean, it really is a crazy experience to be in here.
09:45 And it's doing that with just architectural structures.
09:50 And throughout the show, this was never planned.
09:52 And I don't know how it happened, but so many works
09:55 became architectural.
09:57 There's this wall by Kelly Tissot, this artist Daniel
10:00 Modivenu.
10:03 He puts his paintings on this structure coming off the wall.
10:06 There's this wall here in the back
10:08 that has Laura da Vinci's geese on it.
10:11 It's a wall, but basically it's a pedestal for her work.
10:15 Lisa Jo's painting comes flying off the wall.
10:17 It's really crazy.
10:18 I've never-- I mean, I know lots of artists.
10:20 I've never heard anyone making walls and architecture
10:25 as art at this level.
10:26 And maybe that means that we're going
10:28 to see it everywhere in the next two years.
10:30 Or maybe it means that we gave them the opportunity
10:32 now and that this was always interesting.
10:35 Miriam Leonardi's built this concrete wall out front
10:38 that poker games will be played behind.
10:40 So they all come from their own different places as artists.
10:43 But somehow this unity happened on its own and really separate
10:47 from me and Daniel.
10:48 I really-- I mean, three months ago, when all these-- when
10:51 I was looking at the list and there were just
10:53 all these structures, I was like, what
10:54 is going on in art right now?
10:56 And it makes sense, you know, these useless architectures,
11:00 these architectures that manipulate a body,
11:01 they don't really do anything.
11:03 That's a really interesting concept, right?
11:07 That's not giving shelter, that's not providing--
11:09 they're not blocking anything.
11:12 Yeah, everyone's built their own walls.
11:14 It's just the opposite of the one we always hear about.
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