In her first solo exhibition in North America, the German conceptual artist Alice Creischer shows a recent body of work that encompasses video, photo collage, text and sculpture. Through her artistic practice, her curating and her writing, Creischer has become a crucial voice of an institutionally critical practice that struggles for a grammar to simultaneously analyze and criticize, comment and intervene into the socio-economic fabric she finds herself surrounded by.
Her exhibition
I / I CAN / I CANNOT / I CANNOT VENTURE MYSELF stages the slow rise of neoliberalism and its imperatives of creative destruction: to liberate individuals from governmental checks so they venture their dreams and sell them on the free market. However, instead of hallucinating about the (im-) possibilities of an exodus, instead of daydreaming about the all-encompassing neoliberalism that has obliterated the quest for an outside, Creischer suggests that it is about localizing this seemingly monstrous and ghostly word. It is about pinning the neoliberal counter-revolution down to concrete words and events, to define the enemy and regain the ability to struggle.
Alice Creischer (born 1960, Gerolstein) is a German artist. She studied philosophy and literature at University of Düsseldorf and visual arts at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In her works Alice Creischer deals mainly with the relationship of the individual with the social and economic power structures in the age of neoliberalism. As one of the key figures of German political art in the 90s, Creischer was involved in many collaborative projects, publications and exhibitions. She lives and works in Berlin and Buenos Aires.
Pujan Karambeigi is a writer and curator based in New York. Currently conducting his Graduate Studies at the Department of Art History at Columbia University, he is co-founder of the super filme curatorial collective and the Curatorial Fellow 18/19 of the Wallach Art Gallery, New York. He is co-editor of the book
en plein air (Spector Books 2018) and editor of the forthcoming book
Selected Writings by Alice Creischer (saxpublisher, Spring 2019). His writing has appeared in
Artforum,
Art in America and
Heft, among others, and his research has focused on the emergence of identity politics in the 80s.
Established in 1986, the Wallach Art Gallery is the Columbia University's premier visual arts space and advances Columbia University's historical, critical, and creative engagement with the visual arts. Serving as both a laboratory and a forum, the Wallach Art Gallery offers opportunities for curatorial practice and discourse, while bridging the diverse approaches to the arts at the University with a welcome broader public. Since 2016, the Wallach Art Gallery has been located in Upper Manhattan's new cultural exchange center, the Lenfest Center for the Arts.
The exhibition is sponsored by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa).
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