On the Seventh day of Christmas

On the Seventh day of Christmas, My true love gave to me: seven days of encounters and discussions; my six interview, with Peles Empire, after Mara Castilho interview; over than five good news on gallery visits, art books, Murano glass and exhibitions, and coffee beans; more than four sculptures from Tony Cragg; three exhibitions to see; two places to sleep: a set of impressions and feelings.

To mark the close of Art Basel Miami Beach 2012, Boetzelaer|Nispen presents a series of one-to-one encounters devised by artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas specifically for the fair’s trans-geographic non-site.

THIS IS THE END (Part One)
 

Camp Red Haven, British military intelligence monitoring post, near Tripoli, 1st September 1969: A thick fog hangs low over the ground, swelling around the bases of palm trees that sway in the hot breeze. Mice scurry for shelter as the ominous sound of the advancing hordes builds with the fury of God’s own thunder:
“Our massed enemies are gathering against us. Virtuous anger is our right. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, forever: victory or death.”

As the economic rationale for the neoliberal project collapses – with its austerity programme failing in Europe and with the fastest-growing new super-economies around the world employing massive state intervention – could we be seeing the end of the social order that produced Contemporary Art? The word ‘contemporary’ was used in the past simply to describe the art of the time but it has perhaps come to refer now to a particular ideological formation forged through the deregulation of financial services by Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s and the collapse of communism as a mainstream political alternative at the end of that decade. The ‘contemporary’ era’s ideology of non-ideology has prioritised a fantasy of the liberated, autonomous individual but could this be coming to an end with the fall from dominance of the West? Might Contemporary Art in fact be a limited art historical period that we will look back on as the art of neoliberalism? And what could the art of the next phase of globalisation be for?

Through a discursive encounter based on a historical misunderstanding over intelligence information from Libya following Colonel Gaddafi’s Socialist Revolution, Christopher Kulendran Thomas will take participants literally to the end of the road to consider the direction in which a new path might be forged.

Appointments are free and available throughout Sunday 9th December from 10am to 8pm but must be booked in advance by emailing thisistheend2012miami@gmail.com. Please indicate your preferred time and await confirmation. Meetings will begin at The Raleigh, 1775 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach.

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Christopher Kulendran Thomas (b. 1979, London, UK) works though collaboration and/or exploitation, manipulating the processes through which contemporary art is distributed in order to set in motion the mechanisms of social change. Thomas completed his MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths (University of London) in 2012. His ongoing enterprise When Platitudes Become Form can be seen at Banner Repeater (London) until December 16th. In February he will be making a two-person presentation with Jamie Shovlin at Art Rotterdam 2013 for Boetzelaer|Nispen and opening his solo show at the gallery in Amsterdam.

More information on Boetzelaer|Nispen can be found on www.boetzelaernispen.com.