NO DICE (I) at Kimberly-Klark

Artists: Nickolas Calabrese, Daniel Chew, Sylvia Jeffriess, Yefu Liu, Megan Plunkett, Am Schmidt

Exhibition title: NO DICE (I)

Curated by: Howie Chen

Venue: Kimberly-Klark, New York, US

Date: November 14 – December 13, 2015

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Kimberly-Klark, New York

Mystery fabricates objects … it is a team that enjoys hiding … artworks in this game are imaginary organizations of the world which, in order to be activated, need to be put in contact with one or more human beings … They are of different kinds … delinquent artworks … whose purpose is to test the cohesiveness of society … perfect worlds, structures which achieve a saturation of the relationship between the parts and the whole … Mystery functions with an arbitrary and anti-democratic organization … Mystery practices secrecy, concealment, in some cases oblivion … it is typical for Mystery to hide, and it may be that secrecy is not just a condition, but the very substance … Mystery requires shadows, and money is solar in nature … [The Police] favors (if not actually creates) the subversive function of Mystery; and in the very heat of the battle, its hierarchical orders command the publication of Mystery’s secrets. —Raúl Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema.

This exhibition deals with the textuality of inchoate possibilities — in the face of the total administration of life.

Howie Chen is a New York–based curator involved in collaborative art production and research. Chen is a cofounder of Dispatch, a curatorial production office and project space founded in New York City. He is part of New Humans, a moniker for performance collaborations with musicians, artists and designers, and also the critical research project, JEQU. Currently, Chen teaches at the New York University Steinhardt School and has been a lecturer at the Art, Culture and Technology program at MIT, Parsons School for Design, and Rhode Island School of Design. Upcoming projects include “The Great Unlearning”, a multi-platform series on counter-pedagogical practices in contemporary art, with curator Manuel Cirauqui and MIT researcher Gabriel Kahan.