Participating artists: Kelly Barrie, Justin Beal, Huma Bhabha, Anya Gallaccio, Wade Guyton, Barkley Hendricks, Roni Horn, Igloolik Isuma Productions, Mary Kelly, Charles Long, Michelle Lopez, Andrew Lord, Robert Mapplethorpe, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Jack Pierson, Michael Queenland, Marco Rios, Amanda Ross-Ho, Julia Scher, Haim Steinbach, Lisa Tan, Josh Tonsfeldt

Curated by Jeffrey Uslip

Nina In Position presents diverse artistic strategies that complicate the legibility of lack and difference in America. The selected artworks employ Walter Benjamin’s assertion, “To live is to leave traces,” as a platform from which to view and critique the body and its environs. Occupying Artists Space’s main gallery with a series of sculptural and post-sculptural gestures, Nina In Position reveals emancipated forms that, through their inherent deviance, function as “resistance to regimes of the normal.” Nina In Position is an attempt to articulate a new trajectory of sculptural encounters that rebel against the condition described by Benjamin as “Left Melancholia.” The exhibition’s curatorial focus aims to unlock the ways in which artistic exercises, histories, and narratives are re-signified within contemporary visual culture.

Nina In Position strives to challenge strict parameters of objecthood, exhibiting works that evade limitations and stealthily avoid genre. The work in the exhibition is hybrid, activated, and hyper-aware of its immediate environment. The gallery functions as a safe-house harboring artworks that, through their radicality and hybridity, challenge hierarchy and authority. The artworks elaborate sculpture’s mercurial qualities by examining materiality, transience, and the processes of making. They dodge overarching paradigms of social change, and instead gesture towards unknown forms, new constructions, and alternative modes of representation. Employing a Socratic strategy, Nina In Position’s curatorial matrix places intergenerational artworks in dialogue in order to identify how social, cultural, and geopolitical change occurs on a local level, as well as to articulate how methodologies, practices, and tolerance shape-shift over decades.