art and context

a selection of works from the berezdivin collection

Art and context aims to examine, through a series of exhibitions, the relationships between art and context, as well as the representations that arise from the diverse modes of production and exhibition of the work of art. The first exhibition in the series, art and context I: leave your mind and come to your senses addressed the redefinition of the notion of spectatorship and reconsidered the spectator’s relation with the exhibition space and the artwork. Many of the works presented in art and context I evidenced a departure from the object and focused on the experiential aspect of art, challenging traditional conventions of display and engaging the public in an awareness of the exhibition space, its dynamics and discourses. This “dematerialization” of the work of art — a clear legacy of conceptualist strategies of the sixties and seventies– plays an important role in the shift towards the work’s transformation into a semantic object and its agency in the production of meaning; where object, context, and audience become the constitutive elements of the work of art. The very definition of context has also expanded to imply not only the physical location of the work but the cultural, social and economic milieus that inform art’s production and circulation. On this occasion the exhibitions that comprise, art and context, II, III, and IV, examine institutional and commercial contexts and their logics of display and representation; inviting the spectator to become a keen observer, an ethnographer of sorts, in order to better assess the complex negotiations of meaning that take place between art and context.