NEW YORK, NY.- Hauser & Wirth is presenting ‘Studio Visit,’ an exhibition in partnership with Performance Space New York—a nonprofit organization that since 1980 has served as a laboratory for cultural experimentation and artistic dissent—and is proud to support its mission and future programming. Between 2007 and 2010, artists Anicka Yi and Josh Kline collaborated with Jon Santos to form Circular File, a brief but consequential art collective that experimented with collaborative video production, improvisation and the sociality of artistic labor. Fifteen years later, Yi and Kline reconvene to initiate ‘Studio Visit,’ a curatorial project that is also an art installation in its own right.
Featuring work by American Artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Huma Bhabha, Cecily Brown, Nicole Eisenman, Jason Fox, Black Quantum Futurism, Nikita Gale, Georgia Gardner Gray, Jesús Hilario-Reyes, Josh Kline, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Carolyn Lazard, Guadalupe Maravilla, Paul McCarthy, New Red Order, Monira Al Qadiri, Farah Al Qasimi, Alicia Riccio, Tschabalala Self, Avery Singer, Tavares Strachan, Sung Tieu, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Anicka Yi and Ambera Wellmann, the presentation will focus on the artist’s studio in the 21st Century, posing questions about how conditions of artistic work are structured, perceived, and valued today.
‘Studio Visit’ foregrounds the studio as material infrastructure and conceptual site. The project centers on the studio not as a private enclave of production, but as part of a larger generative field in which identities are formed, solidarities are tested and economies emerge. Artist studios often flock together in larger buildings and neighborhoods. Community and dialogue—and invitations to visit each other’s studios—often grow out of chance encounters between young artists brought into close proximity by real estate.
Yi and Kline consider the artists participating in the exhibition their collaborators and co-authors. In addition to lending work for the exhibition, each artist was asked to describe in writing the studios or their studio practices they occupied at early, formative stages in their career. These accounts were translated, using AI, into large-scale, full-color, wall-mounted renderings. These machine-generated memories are both the backdrop against which each artist’s work is presented and an invitation to extend their studio and studio practice into the show. Many artists today, including some participating in this project, work nomadically, share temporary workspaces, or sustain practices without a studio at all. The images of studios on the walls reflect this reality as well. The studio images are meant to operate as a collective index of studio life—its precarity, improvisation, and resourcefulness— while also staging encounters across generation, geography, and medium.
For the overall exhibition design, Yi and Kline are collaborating with theatrical set designer Marsha Ginsberg, extending a line between the spatial logic of the artist’s studio and the dramaturgy of the stage. This dialogue with theatrical scenography also draws an arc to Performance Space’s history as a theatre, situating the exhibition within a lineage of live-making, rehearsal and embodied labor. Taking place at Hauser & Wirth, ‘Studio Visit’ is also a benefit exhibition for Performance Space New York—an organization who supports, platforms and deeply believes in artists and art collectives like Circular File which often exist outside the art market.
The exhibition opens with a deliberately unfaithful reconstruction of Circular File’s temporary studio at 179 Canal Street in the fall of 2009. In that early studio, the collective gave artists in their community access to the studio and broadcast time in the resulting cable access TV Show they produced. Acting as an origin point for the exhibition, it is a spatial memory that invokes that early projects’s utopian spirit in more difficult times. Studio Visit also marks a pivotal moment for Performance Space New York, which presents the exhibition as a benefit project supporting its mission and future programming. Since 1980, Performance Space has operated from the East Village as a laboratory for cultural experimentation and artistic dissent. During the AIDS crisis, the organization held space for artists whose final performances often occurred on its stages, and it was also here where the idea for the red ribbon was conceived—now an international emblem of solidarity in the fight against AIDS. In the wake of the NEA culture wars, Performance Space New York a.k.a. P.S. 122 defended artists such as Ron Athey and Karen Finley, affirming the political agency of performance while confronting institutional censorship.
Across its history, Performance Space has catalyzed the careers of artists working at the intersection of performance, visual art and activism. Today, the organization continues to serve as a springboard for artists who address urgent social conditions and test the boundaries of aesthetic expression, sustaining its legacy as a catalyst for artistic risk and cultural transformation.
