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FREE | TRADE August 5 - August 18, 2013 |
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About
FREE | TRADE is a curatorial project by Tina Carlisi, Joshua Fourney, Eli Kerr, and Katerina Lagassé. At the project’s conceptual basis, three distinct spaces are created to reflect the geo-positioning of the FOFA Gallery’s location in Montréal’s downtown shopping district. The FOFA Gallery courtyard is turned into an open-air café with Dispatch Coffee along with a weekly public access cinema space while the interior of the gallery is an installation, General Public, with invited artists which borrows methods of presentation from the surrounding retail environment.
Within this context, the gallery transforms into distinct spaces that nuance cultural and economic capital codes and expectations. By creating these distinctions, the project draws from and disrupts the function of networks and art in raw capitalist structures by momentarily, at random times of the project, replacing monetary transactions with a system based in gift economy [1].
The constant slippage between object-based and conceptual or experiential artwork is a point of consideration in our thinking about the shift in labour trends from object driven production labour to service driven labour. The project both borrows from modes of outsourcing and inclusion, from social and economic exchange, and responds to the possibilities that emerge from experiments in capital structures and the intersections between them. Free | Trade surveys the tension between the social economies of both the interior and exterior public spaces surrounding the gallery.
[1] "In a gift economy, there is no concept of value-based exchange, only reciprocity-based exchange... In a capital economy and overarching system of absolute value (monetary systems) is assumed so that exchanges have no leftover relations when they are finished. The transaction is over, and you can move on to the next one. In a gift economy, transactions are never really over because each one produces more reciprocal ties." Purves, Ted. Ed. What We Want Is Free: Generosity And Exchange In Recent Art. Albany: New York State University Press, 2005. 43.
OPEN AIR CAFE - DISPATCH COFFEE
Saint-Catherine Street Sculpture Garden Courtyard*
The FOFA Gallery courtyard will become a temporary café in collaboration with Chrissy Durcak from Dispatch Coffee. This collaboration explicitly negotiates the bureaucratic policies of private and public spaces that influence the movement of nomadic commerce practices. It also parallels the first summer of Montréal’s pilot food truck project, which dismantles the sixty-year ban on street food resulting in multiple conversations about the politics of exclusion.
Hours of operation:
August 5th - 18th | 7:00 am - 7:00 pm
August 8th & 15th | 7:00 am - 10:00 pm
GALLERY - GENERAL PUBLIC
General Public, is an installation within the interior of the gallery displaying invited artists works: Julien Ceccaldi, Charmant et Courtois [Alexis Coutu-Marion, Mathieu Dionne and Florian Pétigny], Julian Garcia, Matt Goerzen, Brad Tinmouth, and Brad Troemel. In this context, the selected works formally and materially respond to, interfere with, and move between systems of value.
Opening hours:
August 5th - 18th | 7:00 am - 7:00 pm
August 8th & 15th | 7:00 am - 10:00 pm
PUBLIC ACCESS CINEMA - WEEKLY OUTDOOR SCREENING SERIES
In the FOFA Gallery’s Ste-Catherine Street Sculpture Garden Courtyard*
On Thursday evenings, the courtyard will become an outdoor public cinema space featuring one-hour National Film Board film screenings. The screening series provides thematic frameworks for considering the intersections between labour, art and place.
Screening Information:
LAB/OUR Thursday August 1st | 9:00 p.m.
ART/IST Thursday August 8th | 9:00 p.m.
LAND/SCAPE Thursday August 15th | 9:00 p.m.
A reception follows each screening at 10:00 p.m.
*In case of rain, the screening will take place in the York Amphitheatre, EV 1.605.
For the complete program of the weekly screening series, please click here
Acknowledgements
We would like to express our gratitude to the National Film Board of Canada for their generosity, materials and support for our screening series.
We would also like to thank Anchored Coffee, a coffee roastery in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, for their generosity and contribution.
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