Invisible Publics

We are viewers, spectators, and listeners. We are artists, critics, curators (or know someone who is). Occasionally, we encounter each other at exhibitions, at openings, at talks. We speak, we act. At some point, our scripted roles go out of focus, allowing us to reconsider the potentiality of these engagements. We are here. Now. We are sharing this space, this conversation, looking at (listening to, or experiencing) this work. We might recognize our affinity through this shared experience. For this duration there is a "we." Outside of this space, we might not share or have anything in common.

The works selected for this show accentuate this relation. They investigate the multiple positions audiences assume, as viewers, as readers, as actors and even as characters in stories. The collective is evoked throughout the exhibition as experience, subject or form. The artists featured in this exhibition mine on events in history, music and fiction, capturing or staging acts of coming together, whereby individuals are conjugated into various types of collectivities. The art works offer us a field of possibilities; the exhibition has become a playground for new meanings. Through our inter-relations and -actions in this space we produce these meanings amongst us.

Invisible Publics is the exhibition of a mediality, the process of making a means visible as such. Making an audience, or invisible public, visible.

The show will feature works and acts by Dora Garcia, Sharon Hayes, Johanna Billing, Johan Svensson, Nikos Arvanitis, Sarah Pierce, Miklos Erhardt + Little Warsaw, the Complaints Choir and Bidoun Video 2010 curated by Bidoun and guest curators Masoud Amralla Al Ali, Aram Moshayedi, and the duo of Özge Ersoy and Sohrab Mohebbi.

The Cairo Complaints Choir (organized by Moataz Attallah, Mai Elwakil and Salam Yousry) will give a premiere performance on the night of the opening Sunday 23 May, 2010 at 8PM. The show runs until 20 June, 2010 at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo.

Invisible Publics
Kurator: Sarah Rifky

Künstler: Dora Garcia, Sharon Hayes, Johanna Billing, Johan Svensson, Nikos Arvanitis, Sarah Pierce, Miklos Erhardt + Little Warsaw, Cairo Complaints Choir , Bidoun , Özge Ersoy / Sohrab Mohebbi