A touring exhibition and platform, Concrete Plastic is a stage for exploring the divisions of material (artwork and archival) through reconsidered curatorial methodologies. From Autumn of 2014, KollActiv invited artists based in the USA and UK to begin discussing and responding to the host archives and their local histories.


The first manifestation of the project included a collective discourse published in Arts Journal Armseye (Issue II: Winter 2016). Concrete Plastic staged as an exhibition at LAM Gallery (Los Angeles, California) in October 2016 and was made possible through the support of LAM Gallery, The Office for Contemporary Art Norway and LACA, whose support includes subsuming outcomes from this project into its archive. Concrete Plastic next will be staged in London, UK.

The project’s framework, defined by the co-curators, complicates the mechanism of ‘exhibition making’ and provides a collaborative platform to explore and challenge the authority of primary and secondary material within art and curatorial production. Artists invited for collaboration are: Michael Bizon, Sinéad Bligh, Chris Cawkwell, Patrick Coyle, Dana Berman Duff, Annabel Frearson, Steve Klee, Anne Guro Larsmon, and Kim Schoen.

KollActiv provides the preliminary structure and platform in tension with the artists who respond to the primary archival material. A frictional structure is produced between the resulting art works and curatorial methodology, which are actualized as a hybrid within the exhibition. As this project tours, Concrete Plastic exhibits recent commissions alongside previous works and is presented as a hybridized mode of production rather than a secondary valuation and categorization.

Consisting of responses including multi-media works and architectural structures, Concrete Plastic intervenes in the historical and contemporary curatorial discourse surrounding the nature of the art object and archival practice. It is created as a forum for open discussion between researchers and practitioners from international locations. The outcomes of the project will be a series of exhibitions, talks and publications initially produced in Los Angeles and London. Concrete Plastic will continue to tour and respond to the current context of the host archives histories, participants’ locales and the archival object.

1
Armseye (Issue II: Winter 2016)

Staging Concrete Plastic2

Michael Bizon_Spotty Difference II_2015
SKlee_Rubber hand

2
Concrete Plastic, LAM Gallery, Los Angeles, California, USA

Reception_Text_S