Press Release
CLOSED



"Closed" will be held from March 13th to April 6th, a work made in the home of the curators, Lewis and Nagaya, at ®edux, culminating as an invitation to attend a house party. Furnishings and archives collected over ten years return the empty space to the function of a living room that doubles as an archival storage unit. In the delirium of the removal, the evidences made from the assembly of a memory of the early 90s are again approached and contacted. At that time the independent art organisation FLAG, in the survey "Life/Live" - "The art scene in the United Kingdom in 1996", was hosted by David Medalla in his performance space at the Mus�e d'Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris.

The curator Hans -Ulrich Obrist invited Peter Lewis and Runa Islam who had organised a series of exhibitions and events in London, to contribute to the catalogue under the name "Flag Organisation" [1] coining the name at the suggestion of Obrist from the exhibition "Flag" at Clink Wharf in 1996. Their texts published under that name as part of that early survey by Obrist, indicate especially in retrospect, the difficulty of any representation of independent work in its effects and affects upon the assembly of memory. An unrecorded performance, "negligence", brought aesthetic dis-identification into close proximity.

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Through the task of physically organising unpublished material temporarily on the floor of the museum, the violence in a message from the apparition of Michel Foucault was spelt out (as if spoken from the grave), as a "body without organs". At the same time delicate photographic images were exposed mid-way in the process of development to the harsh light of the museum.
The artists wore surgical gowns as if performimg an autopsy on the words and images.

During March Lewis will talk about "negligence" and its original and present day contexts through the installed objects at ®edux. A celebratory event to be held on April 8th "As If By Proxy" invites the artist Goshka Macuga to collaborate with the curators. They will present a series of film and video works amidst the collection of personal objects, papers, photographs and furnishings in the context of a house party and "home cinema".

"The dilemna of the Meno - how can we know what we are searching for, unless we have already it, and how can we search, unless we have not yet found it? There is a movement that is provoked by an outer term that remains exterior, uncomprehended and unappropriated and not even identified except as alterity, that affects that movement in an affectivity that is not synoptic receptivity."
xiii Alphonso Lingis 'A Topography of the Problematic' Translator's Introduction from 'Collected Philosophical Papers' Emmanuel Levinas, originally published: Dordrecht; Boston: M.Nijhoff, 1987, no 100 in series: Phaenomenologica

1. Text from "Life/Live" catalogue p66 (extract)

Flag Organisation
The organisation since 1992 has operated as an anti-series, without fixed identity, site or system. Artists and curators have collaborated in ways that loosen or fold categories, as part of a project of incompletion and deformation. Flag employs a certain relativism toward installation unwinding three principle concepts: theme, content and context. The "project" has been loosely signified according to its exhibitions; gravitating around the following areas of curatorial intention. Capsule - viral, corporeal, carnival; Les Mains Gauches - inflammatory, entropic, co-synchronous; Lemon - scatological, materialist, anti-social; Candyman II - dual, charlatan, kitsch; Hit and Run - undercover, opportune, sudden; Lost Property - temporal, artifactual, recuperative; Flag - transpositive, aleatory, indexical.