Emergent Behavior: Project for a Houston Biennial
On View: April 9 – April 25, 2010 by appointment only
the temporary space/1320 Nance Street/Houston, TX 77002/832-867-9207
www.thetemporaryspace.com/manager@thetemporaryspace.com
This exhibition presents a project for an imagined Houston Biennial of contemporary art curated by participants in Raphael Rubinstein’s Virtual Curating course at the University of Houston School of Art. This virtual biennial includes 52 international artists working in a variety of mediums.
The title “Emergent Behavior” is borrowed from systems theory in which it is used to describe a phenomenon of independent parts working together, and not predictable on the basis of their properties. An emergent behavior can appear when a number of simple entities operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviors as a collective.
Unlike many biennial exhibitions that begin with a predetermined curatorial theme, the artists in this show were selected through an empirical process. Over the course of several months the curators refined a selection that includes established artists who have created significant new bodies of work within the last two years as well as younger recently emerged artists. Much of the work in the exhibition involves the scavenging of social detritus. This can be seen, for instance, in the drawings of Aurel Schmidt, the paintings of Mark Flood, and the videos of Cameron Jamie as well as in the work of seminal figures such as Mike Kelley and Jacques de la Villeglé. The exhibition also focuses groups of younger artists working in Iran and Houston.
The presentation at The Temporary Space will involve not the actual works of art, but diagrammatic representation of works by each of the artists in the exhibition. In addition to the physical installation, the Emergent Behavior project can be viewed at www.houstonbiennial.com.
Curators: Danilo Bojic, Michelle Chen, Jeremy Deprez, Sebastian Forray, Jason Giroux, Chuck Ivy, Brittney Ragsdale, M’kina Tapscott, Tala Vahabzadeh
Artists: Makoto Aida, Lady Aiko, Seth Alverson, Mahmood Bakhshi Moakhar, Michael Bise, John Michael Boling, David Choe, Barbara DeGenevieve, Bita Fayyazi, Xenia Fedorchenko, Mark Flood, Amirali Ghasemi, Lane Hagood, Rachel Hecker, Kent Henricksen, Emily Jacir, Cameron Jamie, Yeondoo Jung, Mike Kelley, Dave Kinsey, Aaron Koblin, Annette Lawrence, Cody Ledvina, Samantha Levin, Antony Micallef, Mandana Maghaddam, Malcolm Morley, Wangechi Mutu, Tomoko Nagai, Albert Oehlen, Satoshi Ohno, Robert Pruitt, Neda Razavipour, Anthony Record, Peter Richards, Walid Raad, Dario Robleto, Jon Rubin, Aurel Schmidt, James Sham, Mark Schatz, Chiharu Shiota, Mamali Shafahi, Prince Thomas, Tim & Eric’s Awesome Show, Philip Toledano, Scott Treleaven, Francis Upritchard, Jacques de la Villeglé, Jamie Warren and Hiroshi Watanabe