Mosaiko

Splendid Isolation

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Interview with American Curator Cay Sophie Rabinowitz

As one of the curators invited to contemplate the subject of Heaven, Cay Sophie Rabinowitz oriented her approach to this immeasurably broad topic by naming her exhibition “Splendid Isolation, Athens.” Guided by an immersive approach, rather than a topical or thematic one, her selection and presentation allows the viewer ponder if and how creative activity, social practices, and aesthetic experience may be directed. “Splendid Isolation, Athens” includes a number of art works that employ a formal or structural principle, whether it be as rigid as scaffolding, as symbolic as monetary exchange, as modular as a block, or as flexible as narrative. For many artists in the show, some existent form – be it physical or immaterial, biographical or contrived, religious or scientific – offers a means by which to re-consider, re-form, re-imagine or even re-structure a momentary or lifelong place of inspiration.

Mosaiko.gr had the opportunity to meet with Cay Sophie and discuss her unique project “Splendid Isolation, Athens,” and how it was incorporated into the Heaven theme of the Athens Biennale.

You chose this theme, “Splendid Isolation” and you’ve repeated it in various cities. What changes every time and what stays the same?

Well, the artists are not the same and the site is not the same. In Berlin it was very much about garden space and about a particular architecture, so it is about creating at that time a kind of paradise, if you will, and a kind of place for social gathering. These spaces were also built at a time to create a social space, so this was perhaps an attempt to respond to the existing situation and of course also to Heaven as a topic. But I also wanted to choose artists whose work has some relationship between a form, a structure and something which is not really defined. So you’ll have in all those places an existing structure and something which is conceptual or not yet even defined.

Which leads to my second question. How do you connect this theme to the Biennale theme, which is Heaven?

Well, obviously splendid isolation, to do that particular show was a direct response to the attempt to do something with a theme which is so broad and also so weighted that I needed to start with something that already existed. Also my exhibition process was a kind of relationship between an existing structure, or an existing format, if you will, and something not quite defined.

At first I thought Heaven was an impossible topic, and there’s no way to do anything in Heaven, and how do you see Heaven or represent Heaven, and I wasn’t interested in doing something automatic and reversal. I wasn’t interested in responding to Heaven with Hell. I thought that was somehow not interesting to me.

You mentioned that the space for this exhibition is a space with different interior and exterior elements. How do you make them work for your exhibition?

Basically one of the things that we did was to add a space, for example, that would access a part of Adrian Williams project but also accommodate Ryan McNamara. Also to create a space which was itself transitional, so splendid isolation is an attempt to approximate not Heaven itself but at least have access to it. So the transitions in this space both from the interior to a height are ramps and there are no walls. Also we access the exterior space, so if you think of the architecture of this space and of a lot of architecture in Greece, you have a lot of this experience of something which has a roof and the roof continues and the walls then stop and leave part of the view open. So you have a sense of something that you can go to and can always return back. So here you can go outside to Michael Gibson’s project, for example, which is always open to the public.

The U.S. Embassy supports the exhibition with a fund

For more information please visit: http://www.athensbiennale.org