Gresham’s Ghost is pleased to announce its fourth show, No More Presence.

The premise is simple: two individuals, familiar with one another, be they artists, writers, curators, engineers, etc, will exchange gifts in a call and response fashion for a span of six weeks. How the idea of the gift is interpreted is entirely up to the people participating, the only constraint being that there must be some index available for exhibition. The connection between index and gift, however, need not be linear. In the spanning weeks, the gifts will then be on display, growing in number (depending on how many times the participants respond to one another) and creating a partial narrative, a broken essay, a burnished mirror, relating a private dialogue between the two participants to a public sphere. Inevitably (regardless of veracity) the exchange reflects the giver within the recipient and vice versa. Agreement regarding the nature of each relationship is based on multiple objects at play, beyond the mere display of gifts, such as mental preconceptions, biases, hearsay, corroborated knowledge, and interpreted information regarding the relationship, and the work, and the character of the two people involved.

Also, unlike most exhibitions, there will be no endpoint to this project. There will be no closing, no “wrapping up”. The project will unfold indefinitely. This, however, does not mean that Gresham’s Ghost has found a resting place. Instead, the show will migrate between a physical space and a webpage. While beginning in a space in the Lower East Side, the show will eventually become a virtual project able to be seen at www.nomorepresence.com where there will be a continuously growing archive of gifts. The project will slip back and forth between these spaces as it continues without end.

The effort of the exhibition also relates to examining the economy of the gift, whether they allow for an alternative, whether they demonstrate the impossible, whether they sag into the already apparent, or perhaps whether they point to something that is yet unknown. It is to jump into the tangle of the gift as “secret”, and as never fully present. As a viewer, we will never have the full story, nor, in a way, will either participant However, whatever inadequacies or incompletions are brought to the fore by the exhibition’s concept and execution, this will always be a generative project, one that addresses the fragment as the necessary possibility and not as an end. It is participation with complication, camaraderie with questions, hospitality with melancholy And above all, it is an experiment.

Each show will be held at a site already in use so that the initial act of hospitality, of “gift-giving” is not the exchange between the two participants, but instead the exchange of space between each host and Gresham’s Ghost. Within each space will be the necessary negotiations to make the show possible and beneficial for both parties. Thus, the continuing structure of the show is determined by each and every location that is willing to house it.

Uri Aran and Liam Gillick will be the first two participants, inaugurating the project.