HOW SHALL WE DRESS FOR THE OCCASION?

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, January 10, 6:00 - 8:00 pm
Exhibitions runs January 10 - March 15, 2020
88 Eldridge Street, NY, NY 10002
Visit Thursday through Sunday, 1:00 -6:00 pm

Public Program
Saturday, January 11, 4:00 - 5:00 pm
Conversation: Chulayarnnon Siriphol, Deniz Tortum and Kathyrn Hamilton
moderated by Ulya Soley

Friday, February 7, 6:30 - 7:30 pm
Lecture Performance by Pınar Yoldaş
Introduced by Mari Spirito

Protocinema and 601Artspace present How shall we dress for the occasion?, a group exhibition curated by Ulya Soley with artists Deniz Tortum, Kathryn Hamilton, Chulayarnnon Siriphol and Pınar Yoldaş, mentored by Mari Spirito within Protocinema Emerging Curator Series.

This exhibition considers our obsession with future scenarios and how we try to make sense of personal mortality, technological progress and environmental collapse, simultaneously. Are we experiencing the “end of the future”^[1] or the “end of history”^[2]? How do we fight the accelerated passage of time? Why do we take measures to undo the effects of time? How does it feel to worry not only about our personal time but how much time the generations to come will have on earth? How do we think about the relationship between value and time, when there is an expiration date to humanity’s existence on earth? How shall we dress for the occasion? Invites the audience to contemplate our multiple, contradictory experiences of time.

ARK (2020), a video installation by Deniz Tortum and Kathyrn Hamilton, is a visual essay that positions virtual reality as a potential stand-in for immortality. While extinction may be inevitable, 3D modeling and digital technology offer a way to freeze time and disrupt its linear path. Using the literal disembodiment inherent to VR to underscore the growing sense of isolation and loss in highly digitized lives, ARK asks the viewer what is at stake when we can no longer count on eternity.

Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s video installation, Golden Spiral (2018), in which, the installation space and the video are inhabited by a series of painted golden shells, embodying the tension between the natural and the artificial. By engaging both planetary destruction on a millennial scale and personal obsessions with aging, this work challenges us to reconsider our complex relationship to time and nature. Looking from yet another perspective from/on nature, Pınar Yoldaş’s Regnum Alba (2015) offers yet another entry point into global fears around mortality and extinction. Regnum Alba is Latin for “white kingdom”, and the work is a photo collage that reflects on the environment and established hierarchies in the natural world. In another collage of baby animals, Yoldaş looks into the origins of the idea of beauty in the biological world. Inspired by feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz’s work, which roots our notion of beauty in the animal world, the artist makes a digital collage of young animals, focusing on the dynamic and unpredictable nature of living systems.

As we experience a contrast between technology’s promise of a better future and “learning to die”^[3] in light of dystopian scenarios, discussions around both perspectives push us to think about time in novel ways. How shall we dress for the occasion? is a cross cultural dialogue that asks questions about both the passage and value of time, in order to explore the way we think about, foresee and define the future.

In 2015, Protocinema launched our annual Protocinema Emerging Curator Series (PECS), which provides professional training in the form of learning through doing, a professional mentorship program. PECS is an incubator for emerging curators to gain hands-on experience in exhibition making, from inception to completion, including fundraising and collaboration with partner institutions. Each selected curator works with mentors from the local and international arts community in order to gain guidance, knowledge and introductions into the exhibition-making process.

Thank you SAHA Association, Istanbul, Supporting Contemporary Art from Turkey for in-part support of Deniz Tortum and Ulya Soley, and to 601Artspace, for support for Kathyrn Hamilton. Tortum and Hamilton are co-creators of the ARK commission.

601Artspace partners with artists, curators and other not-for-profit organizations to produce unconventional exhibitions, talks, film screenings and special projects within a non-commercial context. Often its permanent collection acts as a catalyst for artistic and curatorial encounters. Through such interdisciplinary practices, 601Artspace engages with and investigates issues in the production, organization and reception of contemporary art. info@601artspace.org

Protocinema is a cross-cultural art organization that commissions and presents site-aware art around the world, based in Istanbul and New York. Protocinema evokes empathy towards understanding of difference across regions though: exhibitions, commissions, public programing and mentorship. Founded in 2011 by Mari Spirito, Protocinema is a non-profit 501(c)3, free of ‘brick and mortar’, sites vary to respond both to global concerns and changing conditions on the ground. Protocinema.org

Kathryn Hamilton is an artist based in New York and Istanbul. A 2019 Macdowell Fellow, she is the founder of Sister Sylvester, a performance group that make cross-species collaborations and cyborg theater. Her work often takes the form of essayistic performances, using first hand research and found documents. Her work has toured internationally, recent productions include: Brecht Forensics, (in development) which has been seen at Joe’s Pub, Caveat, The Cell, MAX Festival and University of Colorado; The Fall, a lecture-performance about film and revolution, has been performed at Yale University and at The Public Theater for Under the Radar Festival. Three Rooms, a live-skype performance exploring the relationship of technologies of mobility to the crisis of borders was a commission from The European Union ‘Between Two Shores’ program, and has been performed at at Shubbak Festival, Arcola Theater, London; Frascati Theater, Amsterdam; Bozar, Brussels, among others; Her video installation documenting the work of the Peace Academics in Turkey, still in development, has been shown at Amsterdam University and Humboldt University, Berlin. She also writes, most recently her work on Virtual Reality and Orientalism was republished for the New Inquiry Classics edition. She was a 2019 Yale University Poytner Fellow in Journalism and she has taught or mentored students at Columbia University, NYU, Princeton, Yale and Boğaziçi, Istanbul. Sistersylvester.org

Chulayarnnon Siriphol (Bangkok, 1986) is interested in exploring new possibilities in creating moving images. He is thus working between the role of a filmmaker and an artist, using video as a medium. His works range from short film, experimental film, documentary to video installation which are in-between personal memory and social memory, documentary and fiction, reality and supernatural. chulayarnnon.com

Ulya Soley works at Pera Museum as a collection supervisor and contributes to the Museum’s exhibitions and publications as a curator and editor. She completed her MA in Culture, Criticism and Curation at Central Saint Martins, and her BA in Art History and Psychology at McGill University. Recently, she curated the digital exhibition “You Look Familiar” as part of the British Council’s Curatorial Residency Program. She is an AICA member, and co-founder of the publication project Stimuli. ulyasoley.wixsite.com/hxpr

Deniz Tortum (Istanbul, 1989) works in film and new media. His work has screened internationally, including at the Venice Film Festival, SxSW, Sheffield, True/False and Dokufest. He has worked as a research assistant at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, where he focused on virtual reality. In 2017-2018, he was a fellow at Harvard Film Study Center, working on the film Phases of Matter, which will be released in 2020. He was recently featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. deniztortum.com

Pınar Yoldaş is an infradisciplinary designer/artist/researcher, an assistant professor in University of California San Diego. Her work develops within biological sciences and digital technologies through architectural installations, kinetic sculpture, sound, video and drawing with a focus on post-humanism, eco-nihilism, anthropocene and feminist technoscience. Her solo shows include The Warm, the Cool and the Cat at Roda Sten Konsthall (2016), Polyteknikum Museum Moscow (2015), An Ecosystem of Excess, Ernst Schering Project Space among many. pinaryoldas.info

For more information:
Ela Perşembe, ela@protocinema.org +90 531 923 3778
Mari Spirito, mari@protocinema.org +1917 6607332 +90541468 0214
Sara Shaoul, sara@601artspace.org +1212-243-2735

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^[1]James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (London: Verso, 2018).
^[2] Paolo Virno, Déjà Vu and the End of History (London: Verso, 2015).
^[3]Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015).

PRESS

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