14th March 2014 – 13th April 2014
Lanchester Gallery Projects, Coventry

Andrew Bracey, Chan Dany, Michael Day, Doug Fishbone, Lesley Guy, Steve Hawley, Maud Haya-Baviera, Viet Le, Michael Lee, Olivia Notaro, Manuel Ocampo, Julia Schwadron, Chris Shaw-Hughes, Andrew Spackman

Lanchester Gallery Projects is very pleased to announce POSSESSION (II), the second manifestation of an-going project that examines practices of appropriation in contemporary art. POSSESSION (I) was mounted at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center, Thailand, in early 2013 and offered an introduction to the project through a theme of artists’ immersion in visual and material cultures generally. Acknowledging the distinct lineage of theorized notions of appropriation, from Anglophone art critical contexts, the project POSSESSION moves discursively through an expanded set of concerns including internet and network cultures, conflicts of current and outmoded technologies of image production and contemporary visual art from disparate cultural and national contexts. Central to POSSESSION as an on-going project is a reflexivity on the potential of different versions of the exhibition to possess and re-possess the objects of its inquiry: the ideological and aesthetic instrumentality of forms, critically intrinsic and extrinsic relationships for contemporary art, and comparative questions of an artist’s agency in making and re-making visual and material culture.

POSSESSION (I) offered distinctly contemporary perspectives on canonical understandings of appropriation and an expanded field of contexts and interpretation, as necessary for Bangkok an introductory venue. POSSESSION (II) critically highlights cultural and national comparisons as a rhizomatic dialogue on uneven understandings of what appropriation is and can do; and what exchange might mean in an international context where such is often blithe and subject to market forces.

(Text: Brian Curtin)