Simon Starling - Never The Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts)

Simon Starling - 'Never The Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts)'

Camden Arts Centre, 2011

Curated by artist Simon Starling, 'Never The Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts)' brought together the work of 30 artists and designers revisiting shows and past fragments from the Camden Arts Centre's 50 years history. The works were installed back into the same sites they previously occupied, and Starling also introduced new works by artists as an imagined future for the Centre's exhibition programing.

Starlings curation is a confusion of time, conflating different eras of exhibitions into one moment whilst the spatial qualities remain the same. The size able amount of research that must have gone into the project alludes to the evolution of art and design through the process of exhibition making. As Starling orchestrates "a series of collisions between the works" we encounter often awkward placements of works as they fall almost on top of each other.  

Goshka Macuga - Kabinett der Abstrakten

Kabinett der Abstrakten 2003

Veneered cabinet with objects

With an interest in shedding light on and drawing to attention lost and hidden narratives in the history of art, Polish artist Goshka Macuga's practice sits between that of an artist, a curator and a collector.


The original Kabinett der Abstrakten was a modernist wunderkammer made by El Lissitzky in 1927 after a commision by museum director and art historian Alexander Dorner. Dorner had a passion for experimenting with exhibition making and modes diaply and devised the cabinet to be a device for containing and exhibiting art works and objects.


Macuga's exhibitions frequently feature works by other artists. Whether contemporaries such as Olivia Plender, historically significant figures of the recent past such as Andy Warhol or Paul Nash, or unknown artists whose work has been sourced from charity shops, they are treated with a democratic sense of equality. Objects are gathered together for the duration of a show and then dispersed back to their homes in private collections or museums. 


Her Kabinet (a remake of the  Lissitzky original) has been exhibited several times, each time housing a different set of objects, relevant to the exhibition's themes and context. The work becomes a pedestal or plinth for the work of others, while at the same time tying the objects contained within it into the history of the Russian avant garde and a history of experimentation with modes of display. 

Dominik Lang - The Sleeping City

Dominik Lang - The Sleeping City

Czech Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2011

'The Sleeping City' by Dominik Lang was an exploration into appropriation and authorship.

Using his father Jiri Lang (1927-96) sculptures as a medium to reevaluate the role of the artist and curator. Dominik approached the historical context and gestures of art making as a way to explore both his personal relationship with his father as well as various historical consequences of art making.

Jiri Lang created most of his work in secret. In fear of the Communist regime, such a display of creativity could be subject to unwanted attention from the police. Much of the work had never left the Lang household and was mostly un-seen before.  Placed together by his son Dominik as a hypothetical exhibition, the works become instrumental in a critique on the dysfunction of now standard exhibition formats. In conflict with its modes of display the sculptures attempt to raise our awareness of the impossibility of presenting historical material in an authentic and coherent way. 

Nicolas Bourriaud - Postproduction

"The artistic question is no longer 'What can we make that is new?' but, 'How can we make do with what we have?' ... Artists today program forms more than they compose them."

Postproduction Nicolas Bourriaud 

Lukas & Sternberg, New York, 2002 

Nicky Enright reads from the introduction to Nicolas Bourriaud's Postproduction

Postproduction is a theoretical/art-historical text by French curator and writer Nicolas Bourriaud. In the book he seeks to examine the contemporary trend for remaking and re-presenting existing material in novel arrangements and forms. Borrowing from the lexicon of music and television production he employs the term 'post-production' to describe and expand traditional notions of artistic appropriation. Tracing a trajectory through 20th Century art history, Bourriaud seems to argue that increasingly artists strive to redefine what has gone before, rather than create unique new forms.

Buy the book here.
Download a PDF here.

David Spraggs - Speedfreak

 David Spraggs - Speedfreak, 2009



Spraggs older sculptural works are constructed from materials present in the 'everyday' and often become part of a critic of the readymade. With clear references to Duchamps 'Bicycle Wheel' 'Speedfreak' in a way suggests that Duchamp's actions worked to destabilize classical notions of art making and open up a new territory for art to operate within.

Spraggs also worked with Open File to produce 'Pavilion: Screening 23/11/11' as part of our series at Grand Union, more information and documentation can be found on our website in its Archive.

Marcel Duchamp - Bicycle Wheel

Marcel Duchamp Bicycle Wheel

1964 replica of 1913 original

 Readymade

Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel comprised of a bicycle fork and front wheel upside-down, mounted on a wooden stool. Duchamp made the original work in his Paris studio in 1913 and enjoyed watching it spin: "I enjoyed looking at it," he said. "Just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in the fireplace." He decided later on in New York that it was a readymade.

Duchamp distinguished between the different types of readymade he produced as:

• Readymades (un-altered objects)
• Assisted readymades
• Rectified readymades
• Corrected readymades
• Reciprocal readymades - (eg. using Rembrandt as an ironing board)

Bicycle Wheel fits into the category of an 'assisted readymade' and like many of his readymades it combines its two comprising items in such a way so as nullify the intended function of each. The work is often considered to be the first kinetic sculpture.