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…
