NEW YORK, NY.- Yvon Lambert presents Objects to be Handed Over or Destroyed, Jill Magid’s first solo exhibition at Yvon Lambert New York. In Objects to be Handed Over or Destroyed Magid explores the nature of government secrecy and obligatory silence through her work with the Dutch secret service. This show will run concurrently at Yvon Lambert with an exhibition of new work by Ian Wallace. Both exhibitions will be on view until October 24, 2009. Magid also has a solo exhibition at Tate Modern through January 3, 2010.

Under compulsion to commission an artwork for its new building, the AIVD—the General Intelligence and Security Service of the Netherlands, or the Dutch secret service—decided to use it as an opportunity to improve its public image. In 2005, Magid was selected by the AIVD to “provide the AIVD with a human face.” After gaining security clearance, Magid was given unprecedented access to interview agents within the organization. Over the course of three years, these interviews took place as conversations in banal public places such as bars and cafes or even airports, and Magid recorded them in various notebooks along the way. By collecting the agents’ personal information, Magid hoped to discover the ‘face of power’ at the center of the organization.

Magid fulfilled her commission for the Dutch secret service with the exhibit, “Article 12”, in 2008 in The Hague. Independently, Magid continued to explore the emotional, philosophical, and legal conflicts between ‘protective’ institutions and individual identity in an unpublished manuscript detailing her experience with the organization and its agents, as well as her transformation from data collector to agent handler. In advance of the opening in The Hague, Magid gave the service a copy of her working manuscript to redact for source protection. The AIVD did not like what they read and confiscated a number of artworks after the show had already opened, including seven of the 18 Spies series. The organization then returned to Magid, via a representative from the Dutch Embassy in Washington, D.C, a heavily redacted version of the text she had voluntarily shared.

The exhibition at Yvon Lambert New York will include new photographs featuring the artist’s handwritten notebooks (now property of the AIVD); new prints featuring the prologue and epilogue of Becoming Tarden, the novel Magid wrote about working with the AIVD; a live feed from the Tate waiting for the book to be claimed; and a performance in the gallery on Thursday, September 24 at 7pm. Further details of Magid’s exhibition at Tate Modern will be released at a later date. The artist will also launch a website to coincide with the opening of her show in London: www.becomingtarden.net.

Jill Magid was born in Bridgeport, CT in 1973. She received her Master of Science in Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge and was an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam from 2000-2. Magid has had solo shows in various institutions around the world including Tate Liverpool (2004), the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (2005), Gagosian Gallery, New York (2007), Sparwasser, Berlin (2007), the Centre D’Arte Santa Monica, Barcelona (2007), and Stroom, Netherlands (2008). Jill Magid lives and works in New York.