Call for Artists: Outside the White Cube

The Multiple eXposure Project will be curating “Outside the White Cube”, an alternative, traveling, curatorial project which aims to feature image-based works across different disciplines and media by emerging artists from the Philippines and elsewhere. We are inviting local and international artists whose works discuss the notion of the “PUBLIC” and its complexities. Deadline of submission is on October 5, 2015.

Artists working in a variety of media and disciplines are invited to participate and submit their works. We are seeking image submissions such as photographic series, video arts, short films, video mapping, recorded public performances, digital manipulation, animation, digital arts, new media arts, and others. Needless to say, any medium that can be projected to the screen will be accepted.

Please email your submissions, together with description, artist statement, and bionote, to themultipleexposureproject@gmail.com.

For more information, visit our website: http://www.themultipleexposureproject.co.nr or our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/themultipleexposureproject.

About the Theme (Public):

The “public” is a multi-layered concept defined differently depending on how the term is used and framed. It is a notion devoid of singularity and is, grammatically speaking, a terrain of contradictions. As a noun and an adjective, the public constitutes the people, masses or community, and suggests anything that is staged, accessed, or seen out in the “open.” The public can also be used as a verb to describe something one does, as in make public or publicize, suggesting the movement or shift from the inside (private) to the outside (public). Paradoxically, however, the same term also points to the limits of such openness and movement. Given that it simultaneously refers to something “involving and provided by the government”, the public is always at risk of becoming merely an apparatus of the sovereign state and its institutions, thus making the flow of its production, distribution, and consumption partial and counterproductive.

With these issues in mind, we are looking for submissions that address and interrogate key topics of interest, but are not limited to, the following:

- What is public? What counts as public?
- The public and the private - their overlapping tensions and ambiguities (ex: private event, object, or space made public)
- The public as a collective (subject, citizenship, nation, etc.)
- Politics, institutions, and conflicts (of interests) in public sphere
- Positioning the public in the city or urban context
- The value of public-ness (openness, sharing, connection, participation, etc.)
- The limits and potentials of the public
- The public and the subaltern counterpublic
- Public image and identity
- Public performance, gaze, visual voyeurism, and spectacle
- Public and biopolitics (power, discipline, panopticon, and surveillance)

Description:

As implied by the project’s title, “Outside the White Cube” seeks to re-frame the practice of curating and spectating images outside the exclusionary, institutional borders of the “white cube” or gallery space.

Public spaces are used as an exhibition site to stimulate a mode of spectator experience that revolves around displacement of the passersby (public) from their “habitus” by interrupting the flow of pedestrian traffic. We alter a familiar public space and transform it into an unusual, dialogic site for image projection and exhibition, taking advantage of its accessibility and site-specificity in order to redefine the ways the spectators look at and engage with images. Adopting “guerilla urbanism” as a curatorial strategy, we make sense of the immediacy of the “public” and reflect upon its context, meanings, and intersections with representation, place, and discourse. In so doing, we intervene and reformat aspects of the urban landscapes and emphasize the “counter-spectacle” in art viewing and appreciation.

This project also underlines the inherent ephemerality of an open-to-the-public display in relation to time and space. As a “traveling” exhibition which heavily depends on projection technology and public space as its “frame” or “canvas", this project celebrates the momentary nature of image-viewing, consumption, and mobility in the metropolis at a time of constant flux and transition.

Sites and Duration:
Selected works will be projected and displayed in public spaces in different parts of Metro Manila where there is a massive flow of human traffic. Possible sites defined by law as “public place” include: “any highway, boulevard, avenue, road, street, bridge or other thoroughfare, park, plaza, square, and/or any open space of public ownership where the people are allowed access.” Each exhibition will run anywhere from a few hours to a week. The first phase of the traveling exhibition will run from October to December 2015. An accompanying zine featuring the works of the artists will also be published.

About The Multiple eXposure Project:

The Multiple eXposure Project is a multimedia, multi/trans/inter-disciplinary artistic practice and research-based initiative that explores the many layers of image-making, participatory photography, visual ethnography, and performative encounter(s) between the image and the spectator; the subject and the viewer.