At the helm of London’s most exciting gallery, art dealer Sadie Coles is a true pioneer of support, having been at the forefront of a flourishing and complex contemporary art landscape for decades.

To learn more about the compelling exhibition and gain Coles’ insight into the art world’s future, Keshav Anand spoke with the pioneering gallerist.

The materials an artist chooses affect not only the look and feel of their work, but also the way in which they make it. Rebecca Ackroyd and Alexandre da Cunha both make selections that shape their processes. In Ackroyd’s work, she creates ghostly and unsettling atmospheres through a quick, urgent process of loosely applied materials, from chicken wire, fiberglass, and plaster bandages. For Da Cunha, his methods of displacing and re-contextualising everyday objects have a more conceptual understanding – naturally slower. Often, they involve repurposing mass-produced objects to fit a minimalist aesthetic, heavy with symbolism.

My performance consisted of three elements: myself, an institutional wall clock, and a 5’x8’ sheet of plate glass. The sheet of glass was placed horizontally and leaned against the wall at a 45 degree angle; the clock was placed to the left of the glass at eye level. When the performance began, the clock was running at the correct time. I entered the room and reset the clock to twelve midnight. I crawled into the space between the glass and the wall, and lay on my back. I was prepared to lie in this position indefinitely, until one of the three elements was disturbed or altered. The responsibility for ending the piece rested with the museum staff, but they were unaware of this crucial aspect. The piece ended when Dennis O’Shea placed a container of water inside the space between the wall and the glass, 45 hours and 10 minutes after the start of the piece. I immediately got up and smashed the face of the clock with a hammer, recording the exact amount of time which had elapsed from beginning to end.

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.