Andrew Amorim

Coinciding with the eighth edition of Independent New York, next week Independent art fair will inaugurate its Harlem gallery residency program with Entrée from Bergen, Norway. Presented in collaboration with the Norwegian Consulate General, Entrée will present two solo exhibitions by Norwegian artists Ane Graff and Andrew Amorim on the 2nd floor of 2037 Fifth Avenue in Harlem.

Independent’s gallery residency programs, first launched in Brussels in Fall 2015 and now in New York, invites galleries to curate a special exhibition at the fair’s permanent spaces for a 6-8 week residency – so they can deepen their relationships with collectors and curators in the region.

"In Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, consumer objects are separated from their functional use value, and imbued with an almost pharmacological power to tune our identities. It follows that the costumes we wear have become surrogate nerve endings of social proprioception. You can test this theory by letting a bead of ink fall onto the cuff of a new coat or sweater. As black blooms into gore-tex or merino wool, so too does a quiet existential panic." [1]

Central to Andrew Amorim's exhibition “Lest We Perish” is a collaboration with ToKillSneakers, an anonymous, France-based youtube user known for destroying sneakers. His youtube channel is part of an international community of online fetishists who frequently post amateur videos of their sneaker-wrecking acts. Following previous works where Amorim has sampled material from similar online communities, this time he further engages in the destructive act through the commissioning and co-production of a new video.

Andrew Amorim (b. 1983, Belém, Brazil) is an interdisciplinary artist working with photography, film, video installation, sound, and text to explore themes of memory and decay. A recent graduate of the Bergen Academy of Arts and Design, Norway, Amorim often works by staging actions in front of a camera, subsequently combining found and original material through reproduction and editing. In 2017, his work will be included in exhibitions at Preus Museum, Horten, Melk, Oslo, NoPlace, Oslo, Bergen Kjøtt, Bergen, and I: project space, Beijing.

1 - Excerpt from “Chemical Perfume” by artist and writer Mitch Speed.