Institutional Garbage

Institutional Garbage is an online exhibition that presents the administrative residue of imaginary public institutions produced by artists, writers, and curators. This residue includes but is not limited to contracts, email correspondences, documented unproductivity, syllabi, scanned objects, and obstacle courses; collecting such fragments in one place, Institutional Garbage illustrates the backend activities of imaginary bureaucracies in an effort to trace the private life of institutional endeavors. What comes to the fore is not a cohesive, singular agenda, but instead a cross-section of often misfired objects that, once assembled, try to tease out new strategies for community arts production, education, sustainability, and value assessment. The resulting website launched on September 1st, 2016 on the occasion of Wasted Hours, a live performance event at Sector 2337 curated by Every house has a door. Institutional Garbage is curated by Caroline Picard and Lara Schoorl with support from The Center Program, in response to a 2014 invitation RISD students posed to The Green Lantern Press on the occasion of Hyde Park Art Center’s 75th anniversary.

Wasted hours – an evening of performance, curated by Every house has a door, presents commissioned works by Michal Samama and Alberto Aguilar. Wasted Hours is the third collaborative curatorial coproduction between Every house and The Green Lantern Press. As the only live part of the experimental online exhibition Institutional Garbage (Sector 2337 and Hyde Park Art Center), Wasted Hours considers performance in ways analogous to the exhibition’s framing of the hidden aspects of institutions. The title derives from a letter by the poet Emily Dickinson, written on a September day 170 years ago.
… Does it seem as though September had come? How swiftly summer has fled, and what report has it borne to heaven of misspent time and wasted hours? Eternity only will answer…

  • September 1, 2016 – December 31, 2016
  • Online
Mara Baker, pisa falling, still from stop-motion animation, 2016

Featured Artists

Alberto Aguilar, Lise Haller Baggesen, Brit Barton, Mara Baker, Kevin Blake, Daniel Borzutzky, Mayra Rodríguez Castro, Isaiah Dufort, Patrick Durgin, Tricia van Eck, Zippora Elders, Rami George, David Hall, Kuras & MacKenzie, Sofia Lemos, Jane Lewty, Jill Magi, Nam Chi Nguyễn, Josh Rios and Anthony Romero, Rowland Saifi, Michal Samana, Suzanne Scanlon, Naqeeb Stevens, Tina Tahir, Mia You + Maarten van der Graaff with Fiep van Bodegom and Obe Alkema, and Anna Martine Whitehead;

Curators’ Exhibition Proposals in 140 characters or less:

David Ayala-Alfonso, Britton Bertran, Rashayla Marie Brown, Every house has a door, Lucia Fabio, João Florêncio, Jeanine Hofland, Stevie Greco, Renan Laru-an, La Keisha Leek, and Vincent van Velsen.

Online Exhibition Design: Pouya Ahmadi