Fia Backström

Ten years ago, Fia Backström opened lesser new york in her apartment. Responding to the limits of the art world that she saw reflected in P.S.1’s concurrent survey Greater New York, Backström hung ephemera from loose, local networks of friends and peers. How has our relationship to that work and to the institutional pressures that informed its making changed over the last decade? In order to reflect on these questions, The Artist’s Institute initiated the reinstallation of Backström’s project inside the current iteration of Greater New York. In parallel Backström has installed a new version of The Worker Through the Ages (2010) at The Artist’s Institute, repurposed from its initial context at the Moderna Museet. Taken together, these works and their transpositions consider the conditions under which artists work collectively alongside institutions and one another.

Fia Backström, lesser new york, 2005/2015, mixed media installation, dimensions variable. Work on view at MoMA/P.S.1, 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City, NY.

Fia Backström, repurposed hanging structure from The Worker Through the Ages, 2010, wallpaper, stock image, and wooden shelves, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist. The artist has used this structure for hanging ephemera from selected art activities in New York over the past five years:

CAGE, Gold Bills, 2013, printed gold leaf in plastic sleeves, 12.75 x 10 inches. Courtesy of Andrew Roth, Fia Backström, Tina Zavitsanos.

The gold bills are a series of prints on gold leaf of the bills for the infrastructure at CAGE, sold for the amount of the bill plus the cost of production. They were conceptualized and executed by the following individuals in conversation with the larger context of CAGE, an experimental space where a fluid group of people worked between 2010-2014, located at 83 Hester Street: Tom Ackers, Fia Backström, Cammisa Buerhaus, Oliver Cano, Christina Croll, Amalle Dublon, Alex Fleming, Melanie Gilligan, Jacob King, Kristin Malossi, Karin Schneider, Aliza Shvarts, Carlos Solis, Ian Szydlowski, Anthony Tran, Constantina Zavitsanos.

“CAGE emerges from a desire to create and play a different game within the context of reality and art: to be an art gallery with(out) a gallerist, artworks with(out) artists, an ongoing group therapy with(out) a therapist. CAGE creates a community that is not a collective, but comprises singular and dissimilar voices from five generations that will: support individual production and sales; allow multiple subjectivities to independently co-exist; protect individuals’ ideas without using information as materiality for the production of novelty; and will rely not on the signature of an object but on the respect of the authorship of manifold ideas. The presentation of any production within CAGE seeks to follow a logic based not on the specular or on content providers, but on other forms of responsible engagement. The display of either virtual or real objects is not necessarily the final destination.” excerpted from www.cage83.com

Emma Hedditch & Elizabeth Orr, Double Sided, 2012, 24 x 36 inches, offset print, edition of 100. Commissioned by @Workshop (Samara Davis & Alex Fleming). Courtesy of the artists.

RAC (Michael Appuhn, Gary Dusek, Jared Ellison, Karin Schneider, Ian Szydlowski, Kerim Zapsu, Louise Ward), Radio Al Cabira Group Print, 2014, 14 7/16 x 23 7/16 inches, etching on rag paper, edition of 20. Courtesy of the artists.

Radio Al Cabira was formed in February 2012 at CAGE as a frame to disseminate ideas, political actions, sound collages, silence, meditation, readings, historical material, and anything else that we consider relevant to air—among friends. Since its initiation, Radio Al Cabira has been a fluid group with a long list of members who continue to contribute to its evolution and create broadcasts in New York and in different parts of the world.