Visitors
through September 27
Governor's Island, New York City
Visitors, the next series of exhibitions comprising Art CommissionsGI, the Trust for Governors Island’s public art program, features the work of nine contemporary artists using multiple artistic platforms including performance, visual arts, interactive technology and written pieces to create experiences for Island visitors.
The artists in Visitors descend on Governors Island to create New York City inspired fictions. The historical site of the Island operates as a backdrop that emphasizes the imagined space of the City; it is a location that encourages fantasy and parody, a free space nestled in the harbor between Lower Manhattan and Red Hook, Brooklyn under the watchful gaze of the Statue of Liberty – a place of escape and the imaginary. The artists in Visitors consider this fact through absurdity, cheap tricks, and science fantasy narratives. Through their works, Governors Island becomes an alternate reality, one continuously shifting between its historical past as a military base, current use as a public park, and its potential future.
Visitors is both an exhibition of public interventions and an artist publication available online and in hard copy for a nominal fee of $1 at various sites throughout the Island. The artists’ publication provides a double-take on mapping the Island and the leisure activities that the journey anticipates with specially commissioned pages created by each of the nine selected artists. It also guides an actual and imagined experience within the Island, with artist contributions that refer to onsite works, as well as those that only exist within the psychological spaces created within its pages.
Artists: Darren Bader, Nina Beier, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster,
Ajay Kurian, Rachel Rose, Aki Sasamoto, Pilvi Takala
Organizers: Trust for Governors Island
www.govisland.com/calendar/exhibitions/visitors
artist's publication
