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The Title As The Curator’s Art Piece* acts as a multi-layered exhibition, a series of successive exhibitions in one given space, at a given time. A neutral ‘all over’ curating, constantly expanding in time, two independent exhibitions within a concomitant space are unified by the time of the exhibition.

A spoken word exhibition.
When addressed, the gallery staff act as a voice in mediating the worded artworks as instructed by the artists, may these be sentences, poems, free conversations, instructions, texts, haikus…
Each day of the exhibition, Nick Currie (aka Momus) releases a different Chinese Whisper in the gallery space, constructing an unique accumulation of murmurs. A piece revealing itself through time, that contributes to an exhibition in constant becoming.
For Karl Holmqvist’s work the play by Jean Cocteau La Voix Humaine (The Human Voice) will be repeated (and not performed!) throughout the duration of the exhibition, exacerbating the length and the pauses of the original text. Holmqvist, whom in his own words hates the faggoty pretentiousness of Cocteau (‘love conquers hate—everything comes to those who wait’), uses readers of both sexes acting as a reminder of the sex-change that took place in 1949 when actor Klaus Kinski played this one-act play that was written for an actress.
Tomas Vanek creates a new distributive situation, by offering several sentences from his on-going project Particip n°39 each day of the exhibition. All taken from the collected statements of single sentences that we all experience – that are most familiar to everybody (please send similar statements to HYPERLINK "mailto:tomas.vanek@cbox.cz" tomas.vanek@cbox.cz). Playing on the nature of the sentences and the gender they adopt through the reader, in their accumulation these sentences construct the work, as they contribute to an exhibition in process.
Whenever asked to hear the piece by Ian Wilson, the gallery staff will engage the word ‘time’. Playing on the time of a piece (Time being Wilson’s first discussion piece from 1968), the work insists on the main constituent that is ultimately at the core of all spoken word pieces: time.
Lawrence Weiner’s piece AS LONG AS IT LASTS, verbalises its title and as such offers consideration of the nature of the work (after all, the work need not be realised!), and highlights the fundamental principle embedded in all spoken word works; that they only last the time it takes to tell them.
Artist and writer Douglas Coupland’s contribution is, akin to all the pieces, to be experienced only aurally as a shared engagement. As such, it asserts that the spoken word exhibition is fundamentally of the same nature as that of the artworks, which are words.

A painting exhibition.
Claude Rutault’s piece D/M associated 307 (159+1+2+145) is a composite piece that associates an old existing painting acquired from Bonhams auction house for the exhibition, that is repainted the same colour as the wall onto which it is being hung, and a series of small canvasses (painted the same colour as the wall onto which they are being hung), which become the silent captions for all other works or vacant spaces in the gallery.
Jaroslaw Flicinski realises a new series of wall paintings for the exhibition, all immersed within a subtle light environment. As an echo to Rutault’s piece where the nature of the paint is decided arbitrary by the nature of the support, Flicinski plays upon the paradox of the support becoming an active work, with the visual indeterminacy of a constant blur of whites, this piece replays the assertion that the process of a wall painting in a gallery is fundamentally a process of decay and disappearance, as is the original absence of a seeming-less white motif on a white background.
As in the spoken word exhibition where the materials (the words) that constitute the exhibition are what constitute the artworks, the material that constitutes both the works by Flicinski and Rutault is the physical structure of the exhibition, the physical space.

If in the title the whole program of an exhibition is revealed, the show title by Stefan Brüggemann–which cancels itself by stating a title as curator’s piece as an artist’s piece—illustrates the exhibition’s concerns with self-referentiality and denial. An exhibition where what is is not what one approaches, but what constitutes the space as a series of successive exhibitions in a given space, at a given time.

A publication will accompany the exhibition featuring discussions with artist and musician Nick Currie (aka Momus), curator Raimundas Malasauskas, and artist Claude Rutault.

Mathieu Copeland is a curator living and working in London. A graduate from Goldsmiths College, London (2003), Copeland has curated, among others, Expat-Art Centre (ICA, Musée Art Contemporain Lyon, Museum Sztuki Lodz, CAC Vilnius, Kunstihoone Tallinn and Bizart Shanghai, all 2004), and Meanwhile Across Town with Cerith Wyn Evans, at the Centre Point Tower, London (2004). Previously he curated and published Perfect Magazine (2003), and initiated the Anna Sanders Films world tour (2002). Earlier this year he curated Soundtrack for an Exhibition, at the Musée d’Art Contemporain Lyon, which includes a forthcoming publication.

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