Shimmer’s programs have always been rhythmic, our exhibitions are layered over time, and we ‘fade’ artworks in and out. Often we see our activities as ‘scores’. Sequins will be the first time that we introduce artworks that have their own internal rhythms. What we imagine in the exhibition cycle is termed a ‘polyrhythm’, a movement in which multiple rhythms after time begin to syncopate together as a new fused rhythm. In Sequins, we have curated artworks and practices that work with ‘the rhythm’ in the broadest sense, and in doing so, celebrate difference as means of community-making. The program consists of different cycles, building, cresting and collapsing over the year.
Sequins is the layered beat, a shift in time, and vibrant potential energy.
Sequins is the bond with each other achieved through the becoming of a shared rhythm.
Sequins is the top note of summer carried on a spring breeze.
Within the environmental, social, and political concerns, the sequin of life is a reachable shareable life.
Sequins, cycle 3 with Heman Chong, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Sharmyn Cruz Rivera
Opening day: Saturday 2 September 2023, 16:00-20:00
Cycle 3 opens with Fuga, a moment of listening and celebration curated by experimental sound and performance curator Sharmyn Cruz Rivera. Cruz Rivera’s listening program sets the tone and the pace of the Cycle 3 which includes "Untitled", 1991 a paper stack work by Félix González-Torres that slowly shifts shape and mass. In its open variation, the work is changed by the audience as they take a sheet with them, while the curators can decide, if, how, and when to replenish the sheets taken. As more pages are carried away, the diminishing presence of the piece becomes a trace of the audience’s time with Gonzalez-Torres and Shimmer.
Knowing that Gonzalez-Torres was interested in the dissemination of information by way of commercial and readily available production methods, and by extension the rhythm of the printing press of the newspaper we join, "Untitled", with Heman Chong’s work Everything (Wikipedia) (2019). Ebbing and flowing in and out of Shimmer’s building, Chong’s performance piece involves a performer reading from Wikipedia pages following the links and references where they may go. Both the works by Gonzalez-Torres and Chong disperse into the world, an intimate experience of the information flow that encircles the audience and then is carried out by them into the hubbub of daily life.
Artist, curator, and writer HEMAN CHONG is focused on the future and what we imagine it to be. He describes his work as “conceptually charged investigations into how individuals and communities imagine the future,” which take shape as “objects, images, installations, situations and texts.” For Chong, conceptualism is an approach to art-making through which he aims to shift perception and encourage insight into where we are now, and where we, and generations before us, think we will be. In his ongoing “Stacks” series, for example, he creates visually compelling sculptural assemblages by stacking water glasses on top of carefully chosen piles of books—ranging from science fiction to art to astrophysics—which together suggest various visions of present and future societies.
FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES (November 26, 1957 – January 9, 1996) was a Cuban-born American visual artist. He lived and worked primarily in New York City between 1979 and 1995 after attending university in Puerto Rico. González-Torres’s practice incorporates a minimalist visual vocabulary and certain artworks that are composed of everyday materials such as strings of light bulbs, paired wall clocks, stacks of paper, and individually wrapped candies. Gonzalez-Torres is known for having made significant contributions to the field of conceptual art in the 1980s and 1990s. His practice continues to influence and be influenced by present-day cultural discourses. Gonzalez-Torres studied at University of Puerto Rico before moving to New York City, where he attended the Whitney Independent Study Program (in 1981 and in 1983). He received his BFA from Pratt Institute, New York, in 1983 and his MFA from the International Center of Photography and New York University in 1987. González-Torres died in Miami in 1996 from AIDS-related illness.
SHARMYN CRUZ RIVERA is a Puerto Rican curator and writer based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her curatorial practice seeks to expand the boundaries of exhibition-making to make way for emerging formats of interdisciplinary collaboration, presentation, and dialogue. Her work explores the politics of identity under the conditions of modernity, colonialism, and capitalism and how subversion manifests in creative acts of refusal. She often tackles the legacy of colonization within the Caribbean context through the lens of contemporary artistic production and strategies of redress. Cruz Rivera was a participant of de Appel 2019/20 Curatorial Programme. She holds an MA in arts administration and policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a dual BA in art history and modern languages from the University of Puerto Rico. During her time in Chicago, she served as Project Manager at Volume Gallery and as Associate Curator at The Green Lantern Press based at Sector 2337 where she worked on Lou Mallozzi’s site-specific sound installation, 1:1, and Angelika Markul’s solo exhibition, If the hours were already counted. Recent projects include Fluister de wind waarop at de Appel, Corrosive Like Salt Water at the Glass Curtain Gallery at Columbia College Chicago and An Image for a Vessel at the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation. Cruz Rivera currently serves as Coordinator of Theory of Art, Design, and Culture at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam.