Introduction

This first exhibition in Portugal of influential New York-based British artist Liam Gillick (1964, Aylesbury, UK) results from a series of site visits to the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art made since 2013. The subsequent exhibition takes the form of a year-long presentation and reflects Gillick’s long-standing engagement with questions of process, participation, collectivity and decision-making, and of which his varied approach to language and the language of space are an expression.  

 

Campaign has been conceived as a series of changing sculptural interventions in the large, central gallery of the museum along with other spaces over the course of the year. Gillick presents a progressive overlaying of spatial and performative situations that elaborate previously realized and unrealized sculptural projects dating from the late 1990s to the present. Including sound, sculptural and text-based works that have existed as early prototypes or sketches but never produced on the architectural scale for which they were initially intended, Gillick’s choreography of spaces, objects and ideas poetically addresses themes of time, as history and duration, and the visual and spatial codes of the social.

 

Factories in the Snow, on view since January 2016, served as an overture to the exhibition. It comprises piano, sound and artificial snow, and it was conceived by Gillick for Postman’s Time, curated by Philippe Parreno and Hans Ulrich Obrist for the first Manchester International Festival in 2007

 

As of 8 April, Factories in the Snow will be followed by the presentation in the same space of a 1:1 scaled version of AC/DC Joy Division House, a reflection of Gillick’s first public commission for a social centre for teenagers in Milan. Both piano and speculative architecture merge into transparent framework for text and sound while a large-scale sculptural translation of Guy Debord’s A Game of War occupies the Museum’s glass-walled sculpture gallery over the summer. In the autumn, the exhibition culminates in a series of interventions into the Museum’s architectural framework using the language of the discussion platform. 

 

Within the architectural and programming context of Serralves, Gillick’s exhibition as intervention will contribute to the Museum’s aim of articulating new models for exhibition making that respond to the distinctive practices of artists in their sculptural, discursive and temporal dimensions. 

 

Campaign is organized by the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto and curated by Suzanne Cotter, Director, assisted by exhibition curator Filipa Loureiro.