Times<\/a>. The project rejects a legacy-style institutional model in favour of a nimble operation with a planned three-year obsolescence that rises to meet artists\u2019 needs in the present.<\/p>\nAfter they decided to join forces last summer, the duo found a 3,000-sq.-ft space in Manhattan\u2019s Chinatown (151 Lafayette Street, fourth floor) that would allow them to hold as many as three exhibitions at once in its two galleries and screening room. The Latvian performance artist Jana Jacuka will inaugurate the space with an event on 12 February. This will be followed by a robust programme of solo presentations, beginning with the Danish artist Nina Beier (21 February-9 May).<\/p>\n
In its first year, Times will work with a cohort of artists who are \u201cthinking through absurdity, economic uncertainty, contemporary and historical forms of therapy and alternative models for presenting art\u201d, Guthery says. (These will include the duo Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, Nadia Belerique, Asad Raza, Liv Schulman and Gernot Wieland.) Times\u2019 conceptual theme emerged as Guthery and Sonara found themselves \u201ccoming back to earlier moments of sociopolitical rupture, especially the Dadaists and Surrealists in the interwar years, as touchstones for how artists respond to trauma\u201d, Guthery says.<\/p>\n
Beier\u2019s inaugural exhibition will have a dark, absurdist humour to it\u2014an installation of hundreds of frozen ice-cream cones arranged on the floor that never fully melt due to a preservative that enables them to hold their shape. Like the ice cream, Guthery observes, we are living today in \u201ca moment that\u2019s indigestible\u201d.<\/p>\n
Times\u2019 mission is to provide artists like Beier with a platform to exhibit work that is not conventionally commercial and, instead, embraces \u201ctime as both a material and a method\u201d, Guthery says, while responding to present-day social, political, economic and ecological crises.<\/p>\n
The Times co-founders hope their approach will offer an alternative to commercialised art spaces and, as Sonara says, \u201cspeak to the complex systems around us that are rapidly dematerialising and breaking down. Surrealists and Dadaists weren\u2019t portending a disaster; they were living through it. They were sharing pamphlets, gathering, finding community as they grappled with the degenerating context. We want to indicate that art history isn\u2019t just about work that is canonised; it\u2019s also a record of how people dealt with the calamity of what was happening in the present.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not trying to be around forever,\u201d Guthery says. \u201cTimes is built to show up fully for artists who need support right now, especially experimental and conceptual practices that don\u2019t align neatly with the commercial system. Curatorially, that means making real room for artistic freedom: giving work time, context and the conditions to take risks without having to translate itself into market logic. We might shift in three years; we\u2019ll see what that moment needs.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is not often that an economics student abandons the field to become a curator. But this was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":249050,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,144956,501,156,144957,1767,9728,111,139,144955,69,47902],"class_list":{"0":"post-249049","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-chinatown","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-experimental-art","16":"tag-new-york","17":"tag-new-york-city","18":"tag-new-zealand","19":"tag-newzealand","20":"tag-non-profit-galleries","21":"tag-nz","22":"tag-openings"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249049\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}