LA><ART

LAXART is pleased to present a screening of CULTURAL CAPITAL COOPERATIVE OBJECT #2, a new video work initiated by London based artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen. CULTURAL CAPITAL COOPERATIVE OBJECT is the title for a series of works where Meineche Hansen organizes a group to collectively produce a cooperatively owned art object. For the second work in this series at LAXART, Meineche Hansen formed a cooperative with five artists—Nikita Gale, Candice Lin, Nour Mobarak, Blaine O'Neill, and Patrick Staff—to produce a remake of Shigeru Izumiya's horror film Death Powder (1986). In addition to engaging the body horror aesthetics and Japanese post–cyberpunk frameworks of the film, this project examines notions of collectivity, co–operative economics, and group relational dynamics, while also revisiting fundamental questions about the role of the artist and the production, reception, circulation, and consumption of art.

CULTURAL CAPITAL COOPERATIVE OBJECT #2 was entirely conceived, produced and filmed by the cooperative onsite at LAXART over the course of one day using their camera phones. For Meineche Hansen, the process of collectively producing the artwork within the site of its reception is central to the project's outcome, foregrounding questions about the artwork as a situationally–specific contingent object that reflects and embodies spatial and temporal limitations of the presenting institution. This reflexive, situationally–specific methodology of artistic practice is influenced by early 90s discussions around “project work,” a term that emphasized art and exhibition–making that was interdisciplinary, context-specific, and involved labor in excess of material production. Within the process of realizing CULTURAL CAPITAL COOPERATIVE OBJECT #2, the artists comprising the cooperative revised LAXART's standard artist agreement to identify the particular authorial role of the cooperative, and to ensure that the economic conditions of production, consumption, and circulation of the work reflect the cooperative model. In addition to the film's screening, this updated contract will be on display and distributed in the main gallery at LAXART. By enacting and disclosing social, material, and legal processes of the project, the cooperative aims to challenge assumptions that internal aspects of exhibition–making are merely a hidden–from–view bureaucratic maneuvering—arguing instead that these efforts by artists permeate and charge our experience with the work, situating its public reception and terms of viewership within the exhibition context and global financial capitalism broadly.

CULTURAL CAPITAL COOPERATIVE OBJECT #1 was included in Sidsel Meineche Hansen's exhibition SECOND SEX WAR at Gasworks, London and the Trondheim Kunstmuseum in Trondheim, Norway (both exhibitions 2016). Together with London based artists Manuela Gernedel, Alan Michael, Georgie Nettell, Oliver Rees, Matthew Richardson, Gili Tal and Lena Tutunjian the cooperative responded to the architecture and economics of the Gasworks exhibition and residency space, which had recently undergone redevelopment.

This project was realized with support from the MA Program in Aesthetics and Politics at the California Institute of the Arts. With special thanks to Arne De Boever, Director of the MA Program in Aesthetics and Politics and to Chris Peters, Director of the Video Lab in the School of Art. Sidsel Meineche Hansen is a visiting artist at the California Institute of the Arts with support from the Danish Arts Foundation.