fig-2: a new art exhibition every week for 2015 (aj dehany)
During 2015 I visited every single week of fig-2, the curatorial ultramarathon that put on a new art show reimagining the ICA studio space each week. Here is a link to a piece I wrote for the Art Fund explaining what I was doing. It was an experimental writing project with a basis in conventional art criticism but experimenting with varied forms, styles, approaches and saturated with art historical reference and creative play. Weeks 10, 19, and 23 are stand-alone short stories, and 24 is a twelve-part modernist poem.
Fig-2: the last stamp – Around the art world in fifty weeks. 868
Fig-2 at Bicester Village – Dancing and shopping. 864
Week 43 – Kihlberg & Henry – This building, this breath. 2173
The Fable of Yellow Black and White – A metacritical gag really. 146
Week 41 – FOS – ART WORLD BLAG lets get drunk and trash the mall: Frieze and the IKEA hotdog. 1622
Week 40 – Una Knox – Depth of field to explore history through space and colour. 1088
Week 38 – Josh Wright & Guillaume Vandame – The ICA is turned into an art gym. 2527
Week 35 – Amy Stephens – Artistic intervention, sculptural slippage, geology and horse-racing. 1340
Week 33 – El Ultimo Grito – The Making of the User & the United Estates of Glitch. 1436
Week 32 – Oreet Ashery (Anoxide + New Noveta) – Naked, drunk and dead in the metal circle pit. 888
Week 31 – Broomberg & Chanarin – The impossibility of satire: a satire. 3088
Week 30 – Anna Barham – Humans and computers collide. 1514
Week 29 – POSTmatter – Inside the web superbrain. 1740
Week 28 – Patrick Coyle & Francesco Pedraglio – A hovercraft full of eels. 1560
Week 27 – Karen Mirza – On yoga and self-death. 2578
Week 26 – Anne Hardy – The music of noise, the buoyancy of cyan: a visual and auditory hallucination. 1066
Week 25 – Cecilia bengolea, Celia Hempton and Prem Sahib – Half way celebrations and lamentations, and sampling “the critical and aesthetic currency of our times”. 2235
Week 24 – Ben Judd – “Apart, we are together” – A poem in twelve parts. 3102
Week 23 – Eva Rothschild & Joe Moran – A short story about a school trip that goes wrong. 3471
Week 22 – Marjolijn Dijkman – Alix Mortimer on LUNÄ Talks: Uncertainty Scenarios. 2572
Week 21 – The Rot of the Stars – Sensory deprivation to communicate with microbes in the plastisphere. 1164
Week 20 – D.Cheeseman, O.Hagen, R.Trotta – Guest writer Alix Mortimer on ‘the all-there-is’. 1237
Week 19 – Ruth Beale – A fable imagining what happened when Borges’s Library of Babel had its funding cut. 4975
Week 18 – Kathryn Elkin – On the words to songs without words and the mystery of Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved. 2635
Week 17 – Charlotte Moth – The balance of all things. 1802
Week 16 – Jacopo Miliani – On dance, costume, and the fifteen-mile marathon. 962
Week 15 – The White Review – Works conceived but not brought into being. 797
Week 14 – Suzanne Treister – HEXEN 2.0 – On cybernetics and tarot, with a curious prediction of the outcome of the UK election. 2083
Week 13 – Shezad Dawood – On culture, counterculture and conspiracy. 1532
Art Fund Curator Talk #3 – Politics of Display – The problems of curating ethnographic artefacts and representing other cultures. 2079
Week 12 – Tom McCarthy – Minutes to grand narratives. 1885
Week 11 – Beth Collar – On bog bodies and liminality. 981
Week 10 – Annika Ström – An insane satirical murder mystery story that has almost nothing to do with the show apart from taking its title “Six Lovely People”. 3888
Week 9 – Deborah Coughlin & Gaggle – On the history and future of feminism. 1754
Week 8 – Edmund Cook – Outlining “some of the more irritating characteristics of video art.” 1000
Week 7 – Claire Hooper & Maria Loboda – Guest writer Alix Mortimer discusses art and archaeology. 1427
Art Fund Curator Talk #2 – “On Responsibility” – On Roland Barthes’ To the Seminar and the ethics of curation. 1435
Week 6 – Young In Hong – An intersection between east and west. 804
Week 5 – Rebecca Birch – On Gaelic work songs and dyeing tweed in the Hebrides. 756
Week 4 – Simon Welsh – Four talks: 1. Listening the world into existence; 2. Poetry in court; 3. Symbiosis v Competition; 4. Banana in the mirror. 565, 475, 446, 722
Art Fund Curator Talk #1 – Instituting the social – On curatorial context inter alia. 1064
Week 3 – Hiraki Sawa – On memory, dream and how we construct reality. 767
Week 2 – Charles Avery – On subjectivity and multidimensional space. 486
Week 1 – Laura Eldret – In which I enter the ICA studio space for the first time. 520
For a full outline of the fig-1 and fig-2 projects: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/dec/26/fig2-ica-mark-francis-fatos-ustek
The official fig-2 website is here: http://www.fig2.co.uk
The ICA fig-2 page is here: https://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/seasons/fig-2
You can sign up to the weekly fig-2 newsletter here: http://www.fig2.co.uk/#/subscribe
fig-2 loyalty card 