Dexter Sinister at KUB Arena

Artists: Dexter Sinister

Exhibition title: At 1:1 Scale

Curated by: Eva Birkenstock

Venue: KUB Arena, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria

Date: Abril 18 – July 5, 2015

Photography: Markus Tretter, images courtesy of Dexter Sinister and Kunsthaus Bregenz

Note: Script of Dexter Sinister’s audio-video-installation can be found here

At 1:1 Scale.*, the title of Dexter Sinister’s exhibition in the KUB Arena, is borrowed from a novel by Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), that mentions a map of a country drawn to the scale of a mile to the mile.

Writer and theorist Stephen Wright has recently written about art that similarly operates on such a 1:1 scale, meaning a kind of art that orients itself toward active *usership* rather than passive spectatorship. Like Carroll, he challenges fundamental assumptions about scaled-back representation and its role as a surrogate, subordinate to reality. What happens to representation when it resembles it subject so closely that it becomes impossible (or useless) to distinguish between what is real and what is not?

The exhibition consists of a single, site-specific animation for the Arena, an erA, that archives all past and present projects that have taken place in the space — a 1:1 memory map. Visually speaking, the talking asterisk is drawn from a shapeshifting typeface called Meta-The-Difference-Between-The-2-Font-4-D, also programmed by Dexter Sinister. It speaks with a voice synthesized from the sampled speech of curator Isla Leaver-Yap, then digitized by the company Cereproc Ltd. in Edinburgh.

Dexter Sinister is a New York-based collaboration founded in 2006 by Stuart Bailey (UK) and David Reinfurt (USA) to model a just-in-time economy of print production, counter to the assembly-line of large-scale publishing. Since then the name has variously referred to a publishing imprint, a workshop| bookstore on New York’s Lower East Side, and work produced for and often within art institutions.

Following Dot Dot Dot, a journal originally co-founded by Stuart Bailey, in 2010 the duo initiated its successor

Bulletins of The Serving Library together with writer and artist Angie Keefer. Individual »bulletins« are published online as freely downloadable PDFs, then collected and published as analog hard copies each June and December. The issues are often the product of specific events or exhibition-related circumstances. A full back-catalogue of Bulletins of The Serving Library is available on site, and the exhibition is accompanied by an afternoon of events to celebrate the release of the next issue.

Dexter Sinister, At 1.1 Scale.* Installation view KUB Arena, Kunsthaus Bregenz Photo: Markus Tretter © Dexter Sinister and Kunsthaus Bregenz