November 21. Encounter with Maayan Strauss: Untitled (Infrastructuring)

Wednesday, November 21, 19:00
Untitled (Infrastructuring)
Encounter with Maayan Strauss

The Container Artist Residency—a program that invites artists to work on board cargo ships along international trade routes, and The Service Room, a kitchen showroom-like infrastructure, designed to serve as a platform for communal service exchange, are two projects that Maayan Strauss will present in this encounter. Both explore quotidian infrastructures (of different scales and domains), creating new platforms by shifting familiar formats. Through the appropriation of space and the use of existing resources, the global network of maritime transport becomes a place for an artist studio, and the commercial design showroom is activated to become a shared facility—emulating the domestic modern kitchen interaction in the public sphere, to facilitate communal forms of professional exchanges.

Briefly tracing the emergence of these projects from previous installation, sculpture and video works, Strauss will discuss their evolution as a result of practical concerns, the consideration of contemporary artistic practice in itself and ultimately, the re-imagining of the constructs of art-making, their possibilities, and restraints.

Accompanying the encounter/presentation, an installation of new photographic work by the artist will be on view in the space. Underlying the approach to everyday life and their facilitation, the piece depicts the constant flow of objects, their consumption and exchange, as both fuel and subject matter.

Maayan Strauss is a multidisciplinary artist and architect based in New York and Berlin. Her practice examines commerce, infrastructures, and labor while reflecting on the conditions of contemporary artistic production. She is the founder and director of Container Artist Residency, a program that invites artists to work onboard cargo ships, conceived as a distributed artwork in the form of an institution and spatial intervention. The culmination of the project’s first edition was recently shown at Para Site in Hong Kong, with artwork by the seven participating artists-in-residence. She is the founder of Sushi Bar Gallery in Brooklyn (2013-2017) and is serving as an editor at Art Handler, a magazine dedicated to the behind-the-scenes practices of the art world. Recently, she realized the first chapter of her project The Service Room as an artist-in-residence at Recess, New York.

Strauss received her MFA in photography from Yale School of Art and a B.Arch degree from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. She has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including The Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art; The Israel Museum in Jerusalem; The Haifa Museum of Art; Para Site, Hong Kong; Recess, New York; Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; Andrea Meislin Gallery and Louis B. James Gallery in New York; Shenzhen Biennale for Urbanism/Architecture. Previously, she was head designer for artist James Turrell, leading work on major retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Photos by Benjamin Busch