Occupy Mana: Artists Need To Create On the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy & Friends in Solidarity, Year 1

Mana Contemporary, Jersey City

October 15 – December 16, 2017

Occupy Mana consists of two exhibitions. The first, Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, occupies the 50,000 square foot Glass Gallery, designed by Richard Meier. It features artists whose works in various media (painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, performance) invoke contemporary social and political issues. Of particular focus are human rights and equality, immigration, foreign relations, the environment, and climate change—all topics of alarming concern today. The dynamic visual presentations of these artists amplify and nuance one another, creating a complex environment that shuns indifference, ambivalence, and indecision.

One of the most challenging aims of this group of artists is to convey and embody the emotional or intellectual content of the subject with an appropriate form, one that meets the scale of the concern. The range of these works—from the intimate to the monumental—reflects the variety of depths that these important issues impact our society. Proportion and balance, density and buoyancy—in the artworks on view, these physical properties become analogous to the ideas embedded within them. They create a criterion from which new measurements and new relationships emerge. 

Participant artists are Shoja Azari, Huma Bhabha, Lauren Bon, David Brooks, Francis Cape, Mel Chin, Christian de Boschnek, Mark Dion, Sam Durant, Fastnet (Aurora Andrews, Mel Bochner, Phoebe D’Heurle, Brian Hubble, Christina Leung, Patrick Meagher, James Powers, Erik Sommer, and Mollie Thurman), Hans Haacke, Lyle Ashton Harris, Dana Hoey, Jenny Holzer, Alfredo Jaar, Deborah Kass, Eugene Lemay, Maya Lin, Mary Lucier, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Donald Moffett, Shirin Neshat, Roxy Paine, Adam Pendleton, Alexis Rockman, Tim Rollins & K.O.S., Martha Rosler, Clifford Ross, Will Ryman, Hank Willis Thomas, Tomas Vu & Rirkrit Tiravanija, Nari Ward, Meg Webster, and Diana Wege. 

The second exhibition, Friends in Solidarity, is a selection of works from artists-in-residence and employees at Mana shown alongside their peers from outside of this community. There is no unifying theme between the works themselves; it is rather the joining of communities of artists, with the opportunity to present their individual pieces in the transient spaces of the building: the main entrance, hallways, the café, and a variety of less explicit public areas. The artists are Z Behl, Louis Block, Dana Buhl, Sante D’Orazio, Bradley Eros, Chris Felver, Benjamin Fredrickson, Sarah Halpern, Hands Off Our Revolution (David Birkin, Rachel Libeskind, Amy Khoshbin, Wolfgang Tillmans), Rindon Johnson, Ben Keating, James English Leary, Alberto Montaño Mason, Kele McComsey, Cy Morgan, Antonio Murado, Rocío Olivares, Yigal Ozeri, G.T. Pellizzi, Kara Rooney, Martin Roth, Raphael Rubinstein & Heather Bause, Lola Montes Schnabel, Pacifico Silano, Ray Smith, Sei Smith, Tomas Vu, and Nathaniel Ward.

A month before the opening of this exhibition, all we had was an idea, and a strong feeling that we needed to create something to counter the prevalent toxicity of our political situation and its affect on our democratic society. These exhibitions are structured to activate what poet and writer Hakim Bey has termed a “temporary autonomous zone,” a space wherein the fluctuation of artistic energy establishes the flow of information, and in so doing aligns—however fleetingly—a great collective imagination. Here one finds the potential for awakening one’s perception and agency of self-discovery.

Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy and Friends in Solidarity are the first of an ongoing Occupy series. We encourage our friends and colleagues to curate their own versions with the flexibility and urgency that our present time demands.  Our sheer acts of solidarity are protests in themselves.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Shoja Azari, Huma Bhabha, Lauren Bon, David Brooks, Francis Cape, Mel Chin, Christian de Boschnek, Mark Dion, Sam Durant, Fastnet*, Hans Haacke, Lyle Ashton Harris, Dana Hoey, Jenny Holzer, Alfredo Jaar, Deborah Kass, Eugene Lemay, Maya Lin, Mary Lucier, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Donald Moffett, Shirin Neshat, Roxy Paine, Adam Pendleton, Alexis Rockman, Tim Rollins & K.O.S., Martha Rosler, Clifford Ross, Will Ryman, Hank Willis Thomas, Tomas Vu & Rirkrit Tiravanija, Nari Ward, Meg Webster, Diana Wege

*Fastnet: Aurora Andrews, Mel Bochner, Phoebe D’Heurle, Brian Hubble, Christina Leung, Patrick Meagher, James Powers, Mollie Thurman