MIAMI, FL.-«Art Projects» features 9 projects by internationally renowned artists from 8 countries. On show in public spaces in Miami Beach, these works engage directly with the spectator, interrupting the daily routine of passers-by in poetic, alienating, or surprising ways. «Art Projects» offers fascinating insight into leading contemporary artists’ interpretation of new art in public spaces. Most of the pieces are newly created or installed site-specifically for Art Basel Miami Beach.

Most of the 9 projects are located in the Art Deco District of Miami Beach, within walking distance of the Convention Center, exhibition venue for 220 international galleries. The «Art Projects» include installations on streets and sculptures in parks. A map in the showguide to Art Basel Miami Beach directs visitors to the individual works, enabling them to locate and experience a number of important, engaging, entertaining, and beautiful site-specific works of art while exploring the city of Miami Beach at the same time. These or similar pieces by the participating artists can be purchased from the exhibiting galleries. Descriptions and documentation for all projects are available at the Art Projects Info at the Botanical Gardens. Guided tours are available on request.

The unique collaboration between artists, galleries, Roc-Off Productions, the Show Management, and the City of Miami Beach makes for a diverse exhibition of art in public spaces. «Art Projects» underscores the extraordinary, unique character of Art Basel Miami Beach and illustrates the extent to which the concept of the show transcends the scope of traditional art fairs.

The «Modified Social Benches» (2006) of German artist Jeppe Hein (Johann König, Berlin, 303 Gallery, New York) vary in style. Some of them are openly puzzling, almost as if they had been generically altered, forcing the user to adapt passively to their new form. Others look as if they had been vandalized, but not to the point of being completely useless. Planks might have been detached and laid on the adjacent ground; a leg might be missing. Either way, the visitor is called on to develop a creative way to utilize them. The third situation is the trickiest. The benches look absolutely normal until you use them. Then you discover that the legs or the back are fixed with loose joints, that the planks are attached only on one side, or that the bench sinks under the weight of those who sit on it. Venue: Various locations: City Hall, Miami Beach Convention Center Entrance D, Collins Avenue, Collins Park, beachfront at Art Positions.

Over the years, Alberto Baraya (Galería Alcuadrado, Bogotá) has constructed a herbarium for artificial plants as an ongoing project that reelaborates 18th- and 19th- century royal scientific journeys to the Americas, such as The Spanish Royal Botanical Expedition in Nueva Granada, which collected, dissected, classified, and framed non-European nature. For «Art Projects», Baraya is building a greenhouse in Collins Park. The greenhouse will be filled with plastic plants and flowers, all classified with tags «scientifically» labeling each individual artificial specimen. If the plastic plants inside this greenhouse were real live botanical species, they could not possibly coexist in the same environment. In this sense, these «Made in China» plants comment not only on the limits of constructing reality but also on the fiction of democracy in a globalized world. Venue: Collins Park, 21st Street

«Queen Bee, War Remnants Museum» by Northern Ireland-born Rodney Dickson (b. 1956; Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, New York) is a full-scale interactive performance / installation. It recreates a third-world-style wooden shack, used as a museum, as can be found in remote places in the US as well as around the globe. «Queen Bee, War Remnants Museum» not only displays artworks that show the effects of war but is an analysis of the effects of war. Venue: Beachfront at Collins Park

«Scarface» is a light sculpture owing its name to a film by Brian de Palma (1983). As first presented in an old cinema in Marseilles in 2000, the sculpture was made of iron letters reminiscent of an old movie banner, and played with the expectations of suburban teenagers, who were all fascinated by Al Pacino in the title role of de Palma’s movie. For the outdoor presentation in Miami, Claude Lévêque (kamel mennour, Paris) transforms this sculpture into a transparent and glittering object, the concretization of an idea floating over the ground. The sculpture also goes back to where it comes from since the film was shot in Miami. Venue: In front of The Fillmore Miami Beach at the Jackie Gleason Theater

In her sound installation «Songs Sung in the First Person on Themes of Longing, Sympathy and Release», English artist Susan Philipsz (Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam) presents songs she has sung and recorded herself. (Please Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want, by The Smiths; Hang On, by Teenage Fan Club; How Much I Lied, by Gram Parsons; and Wild as the Wind by Ned Washington). «Using my own voice I attempt to trigger an awareness in the listener, to temporarily alter their perception of themselves in a particular space and time». Venue: Collins Park, 21st Street

The work «Traveling Snow Shovel» by German artist Björn Dahlem (Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin) refers to ideas on German Romanticism as well as to Marcel Duchamp’s famous snow-shovel piece «Sculpture for Traveling» (1918). The sculpture is a single life-sized, standing, cast aluminum snow shovel lingering lonesome on the beach. The shovel is meant to shovel snow or closely related substances. Venue: Beachfront at Art Positions

«Nomade» is a monumental, 5-meter-high sculpture by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa (Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago; Galerie Lelong, New York). Made of white-painted stainless steel letters, it depicts a crouching human figure. With this new work the artist explores the relationship of letter and language to human cells and the body as a metaphor for house and home.
Venue: Lummus Park at Ocean Drive

American artist Ryan McGinness (b. 1971; Deitch Projects, New York) has been commissioned to create artworks for the cultural hub «Art Positions» incorporating the central containers, radio/DJ booth, dance floor, seating area, open-air cinema, and restaurant/bar. The artist has gained international renown for his large, powerfully colorful paintings combining Pop symbols with abstract forms. Color and form explode from the corners of his slick graphic mindscapes. Layering images and symbols, his unique and accessible visual language is generated by his imagination and day-to-day environment. Venue: Art Positions

«Searching for the Gravity's Rainbow (in the garden of light)» is the title of Turkish artist Haluk Akakce’s (Galerie Hetzler, Berlin) work for «Art Projects». The installation covers a large empty area on Watson Island across from the Children’s Museum in Miami Beach. The ground will be covered with flickering light bulbs of different sizes, some with color filters and laser lights, to create a kind of electric carpet, a glowing landscape.

Certain areas will be raised and marked with different colored and tonally graded lights. At two points of the land there will be towers of different heights: simple structures made of black powder-coated aluminum and also covered with light sources. Although the work is intended to appear and be most effective from the early hours of the evening to the late night, it creates an interesting look all the time, the lights forming a sort of sheer artificial membrane over the landscape. This Art Project is supported by Flagstone, developer of Island Gardens, future site of a sculpture park. Venue: Watson Island, 1050 Macarthur Causeway, Miami.