EDWARD SALEM


For I Smell of the Earth
By Hook or By Crook
Force would vanish from the relations of men
Info



By Hook or By Crook
A curatorial installation at The Hangar
Beirut, Lebanon, April 27 - June 17, 2012

Luis Camnitzer, Martin Soto Climent, Jason Dodge, Jimmie Durham, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Claire Fontaine, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Hammons, Roni Horn, Sanja Iveković, Diego Leclery, Roman Ondak, Gabriel Orozco, Amalia Pica, Cesare Pietroiusti, William Pope.L, Wilfredo Prieto, Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa, Ugo Rondinone, Rana Siegel, Reena Spaulings, Mladen Stilinović, and Lawrence Weiner

By Hook or By Crook is a curatorial installation that explores alternate modes of distributing international contemporary art. Blurring the line between artist and curator, I used local materials from street markets in Beirut to reproduce low-cost works by an array of recognized international artists, for whom the exhibition represents their debut in Lebanon. These works can in theory be made by many people in many places, without the artists needing to be present and with no appreciable loss of quality – though this aspect of the works has not been expressly conceived or acknowledged by any of the collected artists. Here the idea of how and where and at what expense art could be produced is just as meaningful as the art itself.

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