Invited by FRONT International 2022 to produce a project for moCa Cleveland, artist and ACT Professor Renée Green conceived Contact, a sprawling exhibition occupying all of moCa’s public spaces, radiating into the city as a series of public programs involving workshops and lectures, as well as a cinematic screening series at the Case Western Reserve University Film Society.
A contrapuntal exhibition, Contact interweaves and places in conversation Green’s own works with a vast array of invited participants with whom she’s been in conversation through the years, spanning many locations and times.
On her preliminary proposal to FRONT, Green wrote:
“I’m conceiving Contact as an exploration of the poetics of relation; […] key aspects [of the exhibition] will be forms of translation and transmutation: “experiments in exile;” “cinematic migrations;” “synchronizations of senses;” considerations of time, space, place, images, and languages; collections.”
She also added: “These will include invitations to those I’ve been in study with at MIT and beyond.”
Engaging with moCa Cleveland’s unique architecture, this polyvocal exhibition establishes a spatial, sonic, and cinematic conversation between multiple artworks and agents. Enacting Green’s durational practice of being in relation, Contact‘s arcs focus on those who inhabited and passed through MIT during the last decade of Green’s ongoing engagement with ACT.
Invited participants and exhibited works include those of John Akomfrah, Che Applewhite, Marcel Broodthaers, Cinematic Migrations Workshop, Free Agent Media, Laura Serejo Genes (SMACT ’18), Lina Gopaul, Derrick Green, Index Literacy Program, Gabriel Kahan, David Lawson, New Humans, Nolan Oswald Dennis (SMACT ’18), Suneil Sanzgiri (SMACT ’17), SENSE LA, Smoking Dogs Films, Jessica Sarah Rinland (SMACT ’18), Ian Soroka (SMACT ’15), Mika Tajima, and Pedro Zylbersztajn (SMACT ’18).
Conceived before, and exceeding two years of pandemic existence, the exhibition asks: “What is ‘contact’ now?”
What becomes apparent in the exhibition and its related public programs and publication is that contact is an ever-changing, all-encompassing concept bridging time and space, which, “like an imagined index, can point or lead the flowing perceiver elsewhere.”
FRONT International 2022, Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows, was curated by Prem Krishnamurty; Courtenay Finn was moCa’s Curator-at-Large, while Lauren Leving continues to steward Contact’s public programs.
Running until December 31st 2022, the exhibition and related public programs will exceed the duration of FRONT, the Cleveland Triennial of Contemporary Art, which opened in July 16, 2022.
More information:
Contact, moCa Cleveland
Contact film series, Case Western Reserve University Film Society
