BUREAU OF CHANGE | RECENT NEWS
We are what we see.
New Orleans, public art, institutional critique, education, civil rights, social justice, human rights, higher education, social practice, research based art, digital media, BUREAU of CHANGE, Margot Herster, documentary, New Orleans, collaborative media, social media, art, activism, photography, interactive, social media, Margot Herster, Margot Hester, Margaret, Herster, Hester, education not guaranteed, Louisiana
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Thursday night! BUREAU Artist in Residence Danielle Abrams curates a night of performance at New Orleans’ threepalms after a tip that it’s the hottest place to be plus there’s a tiki bar!
In her own words: “I’ll be performing my new piece ‘Shades of Gras.’ Think Elia Kazan’s Pinky meets Brad Pitt for a plaçage arrangement on a 300 year-old float, but only after getting some red beans and rice and a blessing from Tremé‘s eponymous Uncle Lionel Batiste! I’m so proud to be on deck with a crew of immensely talented Bostonites—artists Angela M. Counts, Ryan Leitner and Robert Fieseler, author of the newly released book Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation. It’s free, it’s outside, it’s the most adorable patio you could imagine, great food, good drink, people who smile at you, excellent vibes!”
Left: Cloud operator shredding a customer’s money, BUREAU of CHANGE’s black cloud Micro Ichi interface at Yami NYC 2, Nov. 2016.
Right: Rhizome and exonemo’s micro-edition of the Internet Yami Ichi at NADA, March 2018.
Rhizome transforms BUREAU’s Micro Ichi New Orleans concept, a performative intervention emphasizing collective ownership and anti-commercialism, into a boutique of internet-inspired wares at NADA art fair in New York City.
In 2015, BUREAU popped up in the neutral ground of the New Orleans’ St. Claude gallery district to hawk our internet-ish things. Organized and produced with Caroline Sinders, we staged a “micro” version of the Internet Yami-Ichi, a global underground art event created by IDPW. The following year, BUREAU travelled to the Knockdown Center for the Yami in NYC 2, the biggest meetup of Internet Yami-Ichi venders from New York and around the world, and vended from from our handcrafted black cloud interface embellished in glitter, silver and gold.
Rhizome and exonemo, an artist duo behind IDPW gatherings, commercialized the concept originated in New Orleans for the 2018 New Art Dealers Association art fair in New York City. “While the Internet Yami-Ichi is usually vast in size,” writes Rhizome’s Laura Studabaker, “Rhizome’s edition–like the ‘Micro’ event held in New Orleans–brings together a curated selection of 50 products on display in a small booth.”
Rhizome, a New Museum affiliate and anchor tenant of the incubator NEW INC where exonemo also is member, has been following the history of the Internet Yami-Ichi.
Since its founding in 2012 by IDPW and Exonemo, Internet Yami-Ichi has generated fervent crowds to sample cottage-made, tangible WWW goods and services in cities across the world: Basel, Berlin, New York City, Sapporo, Tokyo, and beyond, including a curated micro-edition in New Orleans in 2015 staged by Bureau of Change.
Writing for Rhizome in 2015, Lucas Pinheiro called the platform “a gripping example of recent artistic experimentations with the materiality of the web.” The following year, a Rhizome Commission supported an edition of the event at the Knockdown Center in Queens.
Net art objects and ephemera have a long history: Mouchette advertised her first public appearance via flyers on Amsterdam streets in 1996 and Rhizome founder Mark Tribe curated an exhibition of net art ephemera at Moving Image Gallery in 2002. Printed or zazzled, watermarked or hand-stitched, this edition of Internet Yami-Ichi is for net art that continues in this vein, circulating through physical networks of exchange.
For various reasons—which we see as rooted in cultural economic and philosophical difference related to the NADA fair project aims—BUREAU works by New Orleans artists and technologists were not hawked in the NADA Internet Yami Ichi booth.
BUREAU’s Scott Sullivan presented in the “live arts magazine,” Antenna::Signals, Issue 007, at Paper Machine in New Orleans on January 24, 2018.
Ulay Deux (Scott Sullivan) in Antenna::Signals at Paper Machine
In celebration of the opening of Antenna’s Paper Machine print center, Signals presentations and performances examine the theme Papers. Papers explored the myriad uses of paper – a medium at once literal and symbolic, malleable and dogmatic, portable and burdensome – to translate and regulate life. The event will explore the connotations of the theme from a number of specific angles, including immigration papers, the Green book (guide to safe road tripping for African Americans in Jim Crow America), Storyville blue books (catalogues for New Orleans’ famed red light district), and rolling and hemp papers.
BUREAU’s Scott Sullivan, an international law and foreign affairs professor at LSU and occasional artist under the pseudonym Ulay Deux, presented on several document-performance works, including the CIA’s experiment in training cats and Osama bin Laden’s English language bookshelf confiscated by the U.S. government at the time of his killing.
The CIA’s “Views on Trained Cats” from Ulay Deux (Scott Sullivan)’s document-performance in the Micro Internet Yami Ichi New Orleans, 2015.
Presenters and performances included:
Katrina Andry
Pamela D. Arceneaux
Vanessa Centeno
Ulay Deux (Scott Sullivan)
Rick Kasini Kadour
John Lawrence
Lydia Y. Nichols
Bob Snead
Dave Sobel
Rodrigo Toscano
ABOUT ANTENNA::SIGNALS
Conceived as a “live arts magazine,” Antenna::Signals is a variety show-styled event from the artists and writers of Antenna. Each “issue” of Antenna::Signals features a spread of 6-8 local artists, writers, musicians, scientists, activists and scholars whose practices relate thematically. The live magazine drops 4 times each year, accompanied by the release of a two-dimensional print publication.
ABOUT BUREAU of CHANGE
BUREAU of CHANGE is an education-centric lab for real art practice in New Orleans. We create, curate and exhibit socially and politically engaged work. Our process commissions artists and non-artists to collaborate on creative works aimed at inciting institutional change while studying social technology, digital media theory, interdisciplinary research and artistic production. We present our work at art institutions and community-accessible physical and digital spaces, as well as US|IS, our public art space at Gravier & Magazine Streets in downtown New Orleans.
ABOUT ANTENNA
Antenna is a New Orleans-based Non-profit organization committed to being a vital participant in the life of the city by creating and supporting artist- and writer-driven programs.
BUREAU of CHANGE, with Prospect New Orleans, presents two installations in P.S.4 at Urban Sidewalk Installation Space (US|IS), 441 Gravier Street at Magazine Street.
The exhibitions opened November 18, 2017 and continued for the duration of Prospect and beyond. Wombs Are the World closed on May 8, 2018 and BUREAU of CHANGE: Social Services is ongoing.
BUREAU of CHANGE: Social Services (P.S. Prospect)
Conceived in conversation with Prospect New Orleans, BUREAU of CHANGE will present a new installation in our evolving series Social Services.
Set against a backdrop of simmering international criticism of art festivals and biennials, layers of text will pose questions about the role of artists and their institutions—small to large, shoestring to rich, obscure to “famous”—as mediators or arbiters of history, culture and conflict.
Seen from the street, the newest version of Social Services aims to turn topsy turvy who we consider artists, art stars and prospects.
By design and resulting from its interactive, participatory qualities, BUREAU of CHANGE: Social Services is an ongoing project. It has exhibited at US/IS continuously since October 2014.
Nikomia Henry debuts her first solo exhibition at Prospect New Orleans
BUREAU of CHANGE delivers a fresh face to P.S.4 with Wombs Are the World.
New Orleans native Nikomia Henry debuts Wombs Are the World at Urban Sidewalk Installation Space (US/IS). In her first large scale public project, Henry collaborates with BUREAU’s Paige Allyn and 010her0 to bring one of her character portraits into three dimensions set to a soundscape, “A Song for Her,” by New Orleans singer-songwriter Caren Green.
Like much of Henry’s painting and drawing, the project is influenced by Black women in pop culture, R&B musicians and body symbolism in Hindu deities.
Installation view, Wombs Are the World at US/IS, November 18, 2017 – May 8, 2018
Wombs Are the World is a project of BUREAU’s interdisciplinary apprenticeship program in partnership with Delgado Community College. More information on how we work here.
441 Gravier Street at Magazine Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
