ISCP, New York

Hungarian participant: Schneemeier Andrea
Date: December 2008- February 2009

The International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP)
ACAX is collaborating with ISCP since autumn 2008. In the framework ogf the collaboration Andrea Schneemeier was invited for ISCP residency program between December 2008- February 2009. Her project is presented in the frame of exhibition t.error- your fear is an external object (Hungarian Cultural Center, New York February 20 – May 2, 2009. Curators: Aniko Erdosi, Attila Hetesi)

Like many visual arts residency programs in New York, the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) is a microcosm of the city’s cultural diversity: multi-national, multi-lingual and multi-faceted. Unlike others, however, ISCP makes a concerted effort to connect its artists and curators to the local art community, while connecting the local art community with contemporary art practice from all over the world.
While New York may well be the world’s epicenter of contemporary art practice and market, the glut of resources and opportunities, which attract the art immigrant, are precisely the factors, which can be alienating and frustrating.

ISCP is a residency tailored to suit the practical needs of the visiting artist/curator by providing space in which to produce as well as addressing the magnitude of the world’s art capital. The program prides itself on providing an infrastructure, which accelerates integration and interaction with the host culture and in the course of its development, has become a catalyst for introduction, presentation, connection, exposure and dissemination.

The dynamic of ISCP is a programming hybrid conceived to facilitate genuine exchange, specifically its Guest Critic Series and semi-annual Open Weekend Exhibitions. The Guest Critic Series enables one-on-one studio visits for dialogue and critical feedback with distinguished professionals from the New York and international art worlds. The Open Weekend Exhibitions attract not only professionals, but a wider audience of art enthusiasts. In addition, a continual flow of international art traffic passes through the program, making impromptu studio visits and meeting with the artists and curators.

As a direct consequence of connections forged at ISCP, many of the over 500+ artists and curators who have participated in the program since its founding, are now represented by New York galleries and have been included in numerous group exhibitions and projects throughout the United States and abroad.

The raison d’être for an artist is to make art. The raison d’être for a curator is to communicate art. The paradigm fostered by ISCP enables these two inter-dependent professions to cohabit, cross-fertilize and interact, while both groups at the same time, inject our host culture with the vitality of the visual language they import to the United States.

link:
www.iscp-nyc.org
http://extremelyhungary.org/events.php?id=56

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THE TEMPORARY OFFICE OF ANXIETY – COLLECTING FEARS AT UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK
A public action on Union Square.
07./08. February 2009. 10. Am-13. Pm
 
The collected fears will be exhibited at Hungarian Cultural Center, New York, as part of the show ‘t.error- your fear is an external object’
At Hungarian Cultural Center February 20 – May 2, 2009
http://extremelyhungary.org/events.php?id=56
 
The performance is part of the project ‘Playing to change the world (The Theater of Anxiety)’.
 
The Theater of Anxiety is an installation and performance project, which probes art capacity to encounter its social/political context in an effective and poetic way. The work exposes layers of cultural histories and intersecting narratives in order to contextualize (and subvert) fears and anxieties of our current world. The Theater of Anxiety, being part of the ongoing series of ‘Playing to change the world’, examines the concept of fear, visibility, interaction, by applying different modes of communication within the process of artistic creation. It seeks to establish a multidisciplinary process, based on relations and resonances, highlighting the constructed and imaginary nature of the notion of fear, anxiety and terror.
 
The project divided into three parts.
The first part will be a set up of the “Temporary Office of Fears” in various locations in the city. The office probes different strategies of communication; it has an anonymous part, placing boards in public space where people can freely note their ‘fears’ on it, and a more interactive and personal part, where interviews are conducted on the same subject. This ‘office’ will provide the data for the second part of the project.
 
The second, performative stage of the project is a hidden demonstration and political theatre, being performed at various locations in the city. The participants are wearing T-shirts printed with ‘fears’, fragments of texts, which together create larger statements, but only works collectively. At various points in the city, the invisible demonstration culminates into (an invisible) theatre. The plot of the theatre is based on the collected data of the Temporary Office. The plot of the invisible performance is based on the notions of fear, visibility, and interaction. Merging on the border of visibility by setting an ambiguous group in the dynamics of the city, it creates a situation where the border of the everyday is intermingling into the realm of fiction and the surreal.
 
The third part is a multi screen video installation based on artistic research on the mechanisms of anxiety and terror; video material shot during the performance and at the Temporary Office. This video work is aiming to re-contextualize the project in the artistic discourse, concentrating not only the micro-levels and inter-subjective elements of the public space as a field of communication, but on the larger mechanisms fears and anxieties generated and constructed in society. It tries to re-examine ideas of ‘fear’ in the public (un) consciousness not by re-using or appropriating media images but generating mechanisms and new fields of communication.
 
The discourse of fear is something that has become publicly more pervasive in recent years, particularly in the U.S. but also elsewhere in modern society. There has been not only a quantitative increase in the frequency with which the term is used, but also a qualitative shift in how it is used. The growth of fear discourse stems partly from the way fear itself is easily universalized as an axis of identification; it cuts across different objects and fields, and provides a convenient way to articulate a common experience and identity at a time when conventional forms of social commonality seem to be in retreat. The development of fear discourse became a dominant resource in the construction of frames for public discourse and, by implication, private life.
 
In this regard, the project is setting to investigate several questions.
Is there a possibility of sharing and expressing the human experience of fear and anxiety, outside the realm of the spectacle? What role art can play in this process?
 
Is there a possibility of alternative image production practice, based on communal experience, without drifting too far into the field of the therapeutic?
 
 
Andrea Schneemeier is currently on a residency at ISCP New York.
Her residency is supported by ACAX Hungary, Eotvos Scholarship and the TMU Foundation, New York