A couple of years ago, kurimanzutto, a gallery based in Mexico City, decided to open an office in Manhattan, New York. This new space did not aspire to be a proper exhibition space, like a gallery, but rather a place for meeting and discussing projects. In my conversations with Mónica Manzutto and José Kuri, the idea of ​​developing a project for the New York space arose. Thereafter, I met Bree Zucker several times, and together we conceived a project within the grid of the city, selected the artists, and invited them to participate. We decided to focus on the existing energy in the city’s communication channels and chose twelve phone booths, located on a circuit, running along the Avenue of the Americas, Sixth Avenue, between 51st and 56th Street. As a static, analogue system, these booths are now considered obsolete and on the verge of disappearing. 

The project includes work by Anne Collier, Glenn Ligon, Hal Fischer, Hans Haacke, Jimmie Durham, Minerva Cuevas, Patti Smith, Renée Green, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Yvonne Rainer, Zoe Leonard, and Cildo Meireles. Between Brazil and Mexico City, I sat down with Cildo – an old friend of mine – to have a conversation on his project, his life, and his love of soccer.

‘Even garbage is alluring because it informs us of human systems. Think how quickly something monkish becomes pornographic by association.’

English artist Helen Marten uses an internal, cryptic logic to unpick the binary relationship between question and answer. She then wads it with simulacra, showing the riddled possibilities of the endless associations between A and B, or even C and D and E. Ordinarily, she has done this through her sculptural and installation works. Through The Boiled in Between, however, Marten’s first work of fiction, the artist enmeshes her chaotic depictions of humanity into an abstract wordscape that floats and falls and gushes with observational intensity. With Modern Matter, the artist discusses this new extension of her practice, presented here alongside artworks inspired by the book, and an extract from the book itself.

Alexander Dixon’s work is capricious. It centres on the meeting place between the artificial and the natural, purposefully displacing the viewer by intersecting environmental planes to create new contextual confinements. In doing so, it allows for multiple spatial and temporal moments to converge, captured in photographs, and then conjoined beyond recognition and laid out on construction metals. According to cultural theorists Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund, this merging of space and time, in relation to the conception of art, acts as a cultural carrier in creating transnational spaces that thematise, represent and become themselves ‘an object of experience.’ This multiplicity of experiential components transgresses the boundaries of rationale, and allows for the emergence of new perspectives, often using the tool of disruption.

The theory goes that when we look at something, we are presented with a message, or ‘signified,’ in the form of a ‘signifier,’ being any image or object – or anything else – that can carry meaning. As underlined by contemporary Canadian artist Shaan Syed, not everyone receives these images in the same way. In other words, we all see differently, and what we do see is massively influenced by context and identity. From 4th July–15th August 2020, Freehouse will once again be open to the public, making its post-lockdown debut with an exhibition titled ‘Thank you India, Goodbye Pakistan, Hello England.’ The show will feature three works by Syed, composed of deconstructed images of the spiral minaret staircase at the Great Mosque of Samarra, Iraq. Across these paintings, and his wider body of work, the artist explores the politics of seeing.