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Say Goodbye and Shake Hands traces a year-long dialogue between two (con)temporary institutions materialized across various physical remnants and objects. Although the exact nature and content of the exchanges is not meant to be fully known, the fragments—abstracted as they are—form an aporia around which circulating activity can be obliquely noted and framed. Of particular interest is the way in which conversation and communication become itemized, instrumentalized, and displayed in real space and time.
“What is at stake is finding ways to participate within the institution without submitting to its standards of functionality, without suppressing fantasy, and without an obligation to its truths and protocols.”
A distillation and intervention of bureaucratized forms, such as meeting agendas and minutes, schedules, documents and notebooks, pastries, coffee, chairs, tables and conversations form the basis of the installation. The project collapses the opposite processes of preparation and documentation, that bookend a project, producing a body of work that in anticipation and in reflection is at once absurd, hopeful, tragic, charming, coy, silly, bleak and touching, offering a paradoxically blunt and nuanced allegory of the anonymous, invisible and precarious cultural worker at the end of the 20th century.
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Division of Contemporary Agendas Department of Conversational Archives
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