On November 16th, 2012, Knockdown Center hosted an “Malingering Uvula II: The Face That Lied (Geometric Edibles).” The event was billed as “equal parts performance, immersive installation, and dinner party.” Created by artists Camilla Ha and Michael Merck, the ongoing series “sparked by a conversation about the Futurist Cookbook and surrealist dinners.” Ha, Fagan Noose, MV Carbon, Cupola Bobber, Keti Kartveli, Brian Chase, Gabrielle Muller, David Lackner, Aaron Fagan, Zebediah Keneally, and Thermos Unigarde all contributed to the various environments.

In a collaboration with Clocktower Productions, pioneer scupltors Joel Shapiro and Richard Nonas transformed the Knockdown Center’s main space and gallery with a non-traditional sculptural installation.

In partnership with Knockdown Center, Sorry Archive presented And the Villagers Never Liked You Anyway, an archaeological excavation of a 10’x10’ bed of dirt overseen by Dr. Ulf Hueber. The space was gridded into 10 plots, each with its own curator. The plots acted as experimental test pits for heterogeneous creative practices.

Exhibitions are historical sites: they reveal with varying degrees of transparency the events and personalities that produced them. A wide range of curatorial perspectives are situated here within the same set of physical constraints. The objects that emerge are not emblems. They are substances articulated over time and forced into tight quarters, and their materiality cannot be ignored.

Sorry Archive’s scientific approach to this exhibition aimed to reorient viewers in their relationship to art objects. Viewers became excavators, grounded in the real, negotiating strata of cause and effect. Yet they were faced with an array of microcosmic histories and impossible mythologies. There could be no endpoint of knowledge gathered from this paradoxical dig, where factual time was altogether disturbed. New works fell into seeming ruin. Gaps in knowledge pocked all surfaces with expanses of the unknowable. This site was populated with artifacts of the future, a reverse archaeology of the present.

Zimoun [KE]³

Knockdown Center, in partnership with bitforms gallery, presented a new site specific installation by Swiss artist, Zimoun.

Using simple and functional components, Zimoun builds architecturally-minded platforms of sound. Exploring mechanical rhythm and flow in prepared systems, his installations incorporate commonplace industrial objects. In an obsessive display of simple and functional materials, these works articulate a tension between the orderly patterns of Modernism and the chaotic forces of life.

For Knockdown Center, Zimoun presented an immersive environment of 250 motorized wood beams and ropes. Each unit cyclically strikes the floor, producing a sonic experience reverberating within a 10,000 square foot atrium – Zimoun’s largest site-specific project in the US to date.

In conjunction with this monumental work Zimoun also presented new projects at bitforms (opening Sunday, February 8) and Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University (opening Thursday, February 5). Click here for the official press release.

The exhibitions are generously supported by swissnex boston, Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, KulturStadtBern, and Swisslos – Amt für Kultur Kanton Bern.