Settle/Unsettle: AIRspace 2017

Kristen Jensen

Sara Jordenö

Baseera Khan

Alan Ruiz

Matthew Schrader

The Abrons Arts Center is pleased to announce Settle/Unsettle, the 2017 exhibition of the AIRspace Residency Program. This year’s edition is organized by the curator in residency, Xavier Acarín.

Settle/Unsettle departs from the architecture of the Abrons as a primary source from which to stress the connections between physical and social environments. Architect Lo-Yi Chan designed the building in 1975 with the explicit intent to provide an inclusive structure, a place that would gather the neighbors and activate social relations by means of its scale, use of materials, and distinctive features such as the large windows and the amphitheater. The upcoming renovations at the Abrons prompt a reflection not only about the modifications of the building, but also about how this is representative of changes to living circumstances related to critical shifts in political and in economic systems.

The effects of urban development as the result of corporate strategies underline the responsibilities of governments and institutions to articulate legal and social frames to protect and expand collective and individual rights. This endeavor has historically been fundamental to the activities of the Abrons’ mother-ship, the Henry Street Settlement. Founded 124 years ago as an organization committed to improving the living conditions of locals and immigrants, Henry Street has been instrumental in the implementation of social reforms and welfare services at local, state, and national levels. Today these issues are, once again, at stake.

The alteration of the building will modify the existing set of relations and will spark new ones, adding more layers to its history. Similarly, the works presented in this exhibition, produced while in residency at Abrons, consider the correspondences between the physical and the social as filtered through personal and local manifestations. As the artists address urban development, Abrons’ architecture, recent political events, de-industrialization processes, and material concerns, their treatment denotes a practice of attention, care, and proximity. In this mode, the works reveal an ethics in the making, demonstrating a committed practice and a coherent presentation.

Settle/Unsettle refers to the ways artists approach specific cases, either human or material, combining in-depth analysis with practices that displace and rearrange. The unsettling and often unclear intentions of institutional agendas submissive to private interests and personal greed, makes apparent the need to develop ethical codes as tools to verify reasoning and action. An effort towards transparency and accountability that is already expressed by the architecture of Abrons, favoring openness and vicinity as a political gesture of inclusivity.

The exhibition’s soundscape has been created by Kristen Jensen. Her work shows an attempt to transpose the opening stanza of Patsy Cline’s I Fall to Pieces using a music box mechanism. The pop sentiments are given a personal inflection as a result of Jensen's flawed translation. Jensen’s sculptural work is also present in the exhibition with Heavy Makes You Happy VI, a piece that defies gravity while connecting material and performative qualities.

Sara Jordenö’s film Diamond People explores the social consequences that manifest in her hometown in Sweden after the closing of its main industry due to global corporate strategies. After decades of symbiotic relations between industry and workers, social actors are now faced with the challenge to reposition themselves within the post-industrial job market.

During the exhibition, Baseera Khan will stage a series of dinners that will be projected over the exterior balcony of the Abrons via a live feed. Khan’s gesture returns the original function to one of the distinctive features of the building before it disappears with the renovation. The invited guests will engage in a semi-scripted conversation about American politics and the precarious conditions of the art field.

The formal and economic aspects of the building merge in Alan Ruiz’s venture to lease the air rights of Abrons, a project that reckons with the recent construction boom in the Lower East Side and taps into the legislation around the commodification of air. Ruiz’s ongoing analysis of windows as sites of political encounter and projection that mediate external and internal tensions continues, this time with Abrons, and Grand Street as the site for his inquiry.

The work of Matthew Schrader engages the infrastructure of the building to reveal the site as a permeable construction. Scharder’s interventions, sculptures, and photographs focus on the vascular systems of the building. The works draw attention to the tangible presence of pipes, power lines and ducts, that signal the network of flows moving in and out of the Abrons building.

Settle/Unsettle extends in various directions: a publication that presents research material from the residents; a series of events that will engage the public with the art works and the conceptual premises of the exhibition; and a text written by Samuele Piazza who was selected but unable to participate in the Residency due visa restrictions. Piazza’s text addresses the unsettling and precarious conditions faced by art workers from a queer perspective while considering practices of mobility and togetherness.