Lines of Distribution

Viktor Bomstad

Elise Macmillan

Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Wong Kit Yi

In what ways can experimental practices from previous eras springboard new strategies for the distribution and circulation of art across today's global circuits? Drawing on The Kitchen's history of presenting and disseminating avant-garde art for over fifty years, the exhibition Lines of Distribution takes up this question by reanimating aspects of its past programming through a cross-institutional dialogue with Lofoten International Art Festival – LIAF (Lofoten, Norway) and its organizer North Norwegian Art Centre.

Lines of Distribution brings together new works by Viktor Bomstad, Elise Macmillan, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Wong Kit Yi that have emerged from or been shaped by the artists' engagements with both the 2024 edition of LIAF and The Kitchen's local and institutional contexts. The exhibition presents these works in tandem with materials from The Kitchen Archives in sections that bring to light the ways this cross-institutional exchange falls within a lineage of The Kitchen's rich programmatic history and that reveal how the individual artists reflected on the New York art center's traditions through their own research processes.

Lines of Distribution focuses on a subset of The Kitchen's programmatic initiatives that extended beyond the institution's New York space to distribute the art forms it supported throughout the United States and abroad. Flourishing primarily from the 1970s through 1990s, these endeavors ranged from a video catalog and television productions to a touring program and print ephemera. Building on these traditions, Lines of Distribution establishes a temporary distribution channel for art between The Kitchen and LIAF, whose 2024 edition, titled Sparks, shares investments in revisiting dissemination processes from past eras. On view at various venues in Lofoten from September 20–October 20, LIAF 2024: Sparks took the Lofoten Line—a regional telegraph system that became the second in the world to support wireless communication in 1906—as inspiration to initiate a present-day, international network through which artists and institutions could transmit signals. Drawing on the resonances between The Kitchen and LIAF 2024's historical references and contemporary aims, The Kitchen and North Norwegian Art Centre partnered to conceive a method for working together with artists that would spark reciprocal relations beyond the model of one-way transmission. Centering this goal, the institutions invited Bomstad, Macmillan, Rasheed, and Wong to travel their works between the exhibitions Sparks and Lines of Distribution while developing or evolving their projects in dialogue with the specificities of each presentation context.

The contemporary works in Lines of Distribution resulting from this institutional partnership include Wong's new video Made for Telefishion (2024), co-commissioned by The Kitchen and LIAF 2024/North Norwegian Art Centre and pulling from the artist's experiences studying The Kitchen Archives and conducting research visits to sites associated with the Lofoten Line. Charting a network of speculative associations, the video links The Kitchen to Lofoten by way of Wong's family home of Hong Kong. Following its premiere in Lofoten as part of Sparks, Made for Telefishion appears in New York alongside a display of materials from The Kitchen Archives that reveals the work's ties to specific examples from The Kitchen's past programming.

Works in Lines of Distribution by Bomstad, Macmillan, and Rasheed further reflect the range of ways The Kitchen and North Norwegian Art Centre collaborated to create opportunities for the artists to connect with cultural and institutional histories in Lofoten and New York. These artists' projects are represented in the gallery display in forms such as documentation, ephemera, notes, and works on paper. These forms make visible the artistic processes through which the artists evolve or expand upon the projects they presented at LIAF 2024, iterating or creating new works to appear at The Kitchen. Lines of Distribution also extends outside the physical space of the gallery, taking up The Kitchen's commitment to using print material as a mode of distribution through a commissioned print project by Rasheed that will be posted throughout New York City. Similarly, aspects of the exhibition transmit online through livestreams of performances and public programs and subsequent screenings of these recordings on The Kitchen's broadcast platform, TK On Air.

Taken together, the archival and contemporary elements of the exhibition coalesce to illuminate historical traditions while simultaneously enacting new possibilities for how artworks can travel across different networks in the present. Against the backdrop of a landscape in which the distribution and circulation of art occurs at ever-increasing speeds across globalized exhibition circuits and in digital space, Lines of Distribution endeavors to slow down these processes to consider the role institutions play in setting artworks into motion and the ways the meaning and associations of artistic projects evolve as they move through different cultural and institutional contexts.

Lines of Distribution is organized by Alison Burstein, Curator, The Kitchen, with Curatorial Advisor Kjersti Solbakken, Curator, LIAF 2024 and Director, Bergen Kunsthall.

Wong Kit Yi’s work is co-commissioned by The Kitchen and North Norwegian Art Centre for the Lofoten International Art Festival - LIAF 2024 and Lines of Distribution.