Panel Discussion | Melanie Kress, Katharina Gruzei: Right Time, Right Place: What is the right time, right place for public art?
Image Credit: Katharina Gruzei
October 11 | 7pm
RSVP to: events@acfny.org or +1 (212) 319 5300
Melanie Kress, Associate Curator at High Line in conversation with
Katharina Gruzei, artist-curator of Right Time, Right Place
Ysabel Pinyol-Blasi, Executive director & curator at Monira Foundation
and participating artists Eginhartz Kanter, Ann Messner, Nancy Nowacek, and Stefanos Tsivopoulos.
This talk is hosted in the framework of Right Time, Right Place – an exhibition at Mana Contemporary examining the ways in which public space has become a highly contested territory in the past decades. It is centered around artistic strategies for working with the layered meanings, realities, and possibilities of the public space. Ann Messner presents a selection of artworks realized in NYC since the 1970s. Eginhartz Kanter introduces the “Sculpture Park West”, an art project in Linz, Austria where artworks were informally installed on a traffic island between Highways. Nancy Nowacek gives an insight to a decade-long engagement with urban waterways, whereas Stefanos Tsivopoulos’s artwork “One Step Forward Two Steps Back”, will be screened as part of the talk.
In 2020, artist-curator Katharina Gruzei convened a group of Austria- and New York-based artists virtually to exchange ideas about working in the public realm. 2022 brings them together to make works in the public space of New York City. Their exchanges and creative acts culminate in Right Time, Right Place, a multi-generational exhibition. Katharina Gruzei gathers these specially commissioned pieces with existing artworks in this group show of emerging and established artists, hosted by Ysabel Pinyol-Blasi and the Monira Foundation at Mana Contemporary, New Jersey.
Artists
Melanie Kress is a curator and writer based in New York. She is the Associate Curator for High Line Art, where since 2014 she has commissioned and produced projects with hundreds of artists, including Maria Thereza Alves, Firelei Báez, Lubaina Himid, Zoe Leonard, Sable Elyse Smith, and Tourmaline, among many others. Previously, she co-founded the Brooklyn-based project space Concrete Utopia, of which she was Director and Chief Curator. She is a Critic at Yale School of Art and holds a BA in Art History and Visual Arts from Barnard College and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Katharina Gruzei, born 1983 in Austria, studied Fine Arts in the class for Experimental Audiovisual Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Art and Industrial Design Linz. She studied abroad at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) and at the Berlin University of the Arts in the class for Visual Cultural Studies. As an independent artist she works in the media of photography, video, film, sound and installations in public space. In her work she traces social tendencies and addresses socio-cultural issues. As an artist curator she specializes on projects and exhibitions about art in public space and informal practices. In 2017 she curated an exhibition at SYP Gallery in Tokyo, in 2019 she was resident at the ISCP – International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York.
Ysabel Pinyol Blasi is the executive director and curator at Monira Foundation. She is also the co-founder of the artist-in-residence program at Mana Contemporary (Miami, Jersey City, and Chicago). Originally from Barcelona, she earned a Master of Architecture from Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona in 2006. Blasi began collecting art more than twenty years ago and from 2007 to 2011 directed a gallery in Barcelona that represented international emerging artists. Her publications include The Bull and the Donkey (Barcelona, Spain: Galeria Ysabel Pinyol, 2008); Trivium, (Miami, FL: Mana Wynwood, 2016); and “Alt-Art Spaces and the Question of Identity Refusal,” Brooklyn Rail, 2017. Ysabel continues to curate diverse and ground breaking exhibitions through the Monira Foundation as Chief Curator.
Eginhartz Kanter, *1984, Leipzig (DE), lives and works in Linz and Vienna (AT). He studied Fine Arts, Cultural Studies and Photography at the University of Arts and Design Linz, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the École Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. In his artistic approach he questions the boundaries and conventions of everyday life and living environments. His (sub)urban interventions negotiate aspects of the public and often have a direct relation to architecture. He showed his artworks, among other places, at the Wroclaw Media Art Biennale, Gallery 5020 in Salzburg, Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Peresvetov Pereulok Gallery in Moscow, and S.Y.P. Artspace in Tokyo.
Ann Messner, *1952 in NYC, is a trans-disciplinary artist and currently lives in Brooklyn. Her work is a research based, often project focused, practice challenged by the more perplexing of dilemmas society finds itself in inner conflict over. Through processes of discernment, social constructions of reality are engaged and interrogated, as specific works develop. Her practice is an empathic response to unacceptable conditions. In her work she responds to the fragile, tenuous, bonds that confirm our humanity. Ann is recipient of numerous fellowships inclusive of the National Endowment, Guggenheim Fellowship, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, a Gottlieb Foundation Fellowship. She was fellow at Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (1999-2000) and senior fellow Princeton University Council on the Humanities (2001-2). She has been tenured Professor of MFA Integrated Practices at Pratt Insuitute.
Nancy Nowacek (1972 Grand Blanc, Michigan) is based in Brooklyn and Newburgh, NY. She studied photography and visual communication at the University of Michigan, and received a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Communication from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Master of Fine Arts in Social Practice from California College of Art. Her work is socially-engaged, and results in photographic, video, sculptural, and installation-based works. Nowacek deconstructs social forms to resist, challenge, and reimagine them. Current sites of her work are the built environment, urban waterways, aging and mental health.
Stefanos Tsivopoulos is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, educator and organizer living and working between New York, Amsterdam and Athens. His art practice is a driven by a sense of urgency to examine the anthropological dimension of the current global crises in economy, immigration, and the environment. His multidisciplinary installations include video, photography, text and performance, the result of in-depth and often long term research in photographic and film archives. He exhibited extensively in art institutions and film festivals worldwide including the biennials of Athens, Beijing, Budapest, Limerick, Moscow, Thessaloniki, Xinjiang, Manifesta, Venice, the 4th Riga Quadrennial and quinquennial Documenta 14, Kassel. He represented Greece in the 55th Venice Biennial.