curated by Jason Dodge

“ A sponge besides being an animal that looks and grows like a plant / Is a thing in your kitchen sink that comes to smell peculiar / & gets neglected to be replaced. Many things, like yourself, / Are often misleading, transformed, or elsewhere. In the morning / When you awaken, your body is already here for you” – Alice Notley from the Prophet

Years ago I was looking behind the ear of a Roman carved head in the Altes Museum in Berlin and noticed traces of a tool. A decision. I recognised this clumsy move, and I didn’t feel alone. I knew how it felt to make a decision in an artwork that is somewhere between a mistake and personality, a wandering mind, an overlooked moment, a slip of the knife and an artistic decision that bonded me to my ancient sibling, just then I felt an immediate ancestral connection to everyone over time that has made something, tried to translate feeling (thought) into form. I like the idea that there is only one artwork and we are all making it together.

When I was invited to curate this exhibition, I wondered if I could ask artists who I admire to imagine how ancestry could be expressed and understood in a work. Could an artwork come about like the translation of a poem, not completely made by one artist, but rather made by some binding dust that is indifferent to the distinction of who did something.

I wondered about translation. I have published a few books with fivehundredplaces dedicated to multiple translations of a single poem, I asked different people to translate a single poem into their mother tongue, so there were two questions and several poems made from one. Ilya Kaminsky talks about how a translation should open windows as opposed to making mirrors. I wanted to expand this question outside of language. My first thought to activate these amazing artists was about how to translate an artwork, how to perform someone else’s work, not appropriation, something different than copying, not really influence, more like thinking together in presence and absence without the constraint of past and present without syntax but into form or notion of activity—clairvoyance and admiration.

This exhibition contains the absence and presence of Ai Ogawa, Christine Dahlrup, Devin T Mays, Laurie Parsons, Mel Bochner, Donika Kelly, Alice Notley, Lydia Ourahmane, James Richards, Tanja Widmann, Iman Issa, Marie Warsh (daughter of Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh, nice of Rosemary Mayer) Rosemary Mayer, Noelle Kocot, Sudden Wealth (Chris Evans, Morten Norbye Halvorsen and Graham Kelly), Richard Prince, Florence Jung, Pierre Klossowski, Marian Anderson, Charles Adams Prince, Josef Pasternack, Lawrence Brown, Bruno Reibold.