Until recently, Luis Camnitzer has been an insider's tip in the field of conceptual art. This solo exhibition features some seventy works created since 1966, offering visitors a close look at the Uruguayan artist who may be considered one of the art world's key figures in the second half of the 20th century. Included in the exhibition is a billboard project placed on the outside wall of the Gallery.

Luis Camnitzer
Symposium: The Future of the Contemporary

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery
University of British Columbia

1825 Main Mall
Vancouver, BC
www.belkin.ubc.ca

Luis Camnitzer
September 30–December 4, 2011

Opening:
Thursday, September 29 from 7–9 pm

Symposium: The Future of the Contemporary
September 29–30, 2011

For related information on the exhibition, programs, and the symposium visit www.belkin.ubc.ca.



Until recently, Luis Camnitzer has been an insider's tip in the field of conceptual art. This solo exhibition features some seventy works created since 1966, offering visitors a close look at the Uruguayan artist who may be considered one of the art world's key figures in the second half of the 20th century. Included in the exhibition is a billboard project placed on the outside wall of the Gallery. This retrospective displays a pyrotechnical intellect, an unusually coherent and principled corpus that is at the same time imbued with a rakish charm and poetic maturity.

Born in 1937 in Lübeck, Germany, Camnitzer was 2 years old when he emigrated with his Jewish parents to Montevideo, Uruguay. He moved to New York at 27, where he continues to live and work, creating works of unprejudiced synthesis of various cultures. He has made his mark internationally as an artist, critic, educator, and art theorist. Formally allied with the American Conceptualists and Minimalists of the 1960s and 1970s, over the past fifty years Camnitzer has developed an essentially autonomous oeuvre, recognizable by its acutely observed detail, acerbic wit, and socio-political commitment.



Symposium: The Future of the Contemporary

The museum as an institution has traditionally been devoted to a stable public. Recent shifts in the international socio-economic landscape have brought the very category of the "public" into question. As the speed and fluidity of economic, intellectual, and political exchange increases powered by the motor of globalization, the stability of a singular public has given way to the proliferation of porous publics, calling for a reassessment of the status of the contemporary museum as such. What obligations should the contemporary museum address when confronted by the publics that populate the often fraught space of the "global village?" How has the waning of the permanent collection as a curatorial resource, the rise of online cataloguing, and the proliferation of satellite galleries, trans-national institutional partnerships, and off-site exhibiting influenced the cultural presence of the art museum?

Speakers

- Nicolas Bourriaud (Independent Curator, Head of Inspection of Artistic Creation, French Ministry of Culture, Paris)
- Luis Camnitzer (SUNY College at Old Westbury, New York)
- Catherine David (Independent Curator)
- Clémentine Deliss (Director, Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt)
- Hans-Michael Herzog (Director, Daros Latinamerica, Zürich)
- Jaleh Mansoor (Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia, Vancouver)
- Saloni Mathur (Department of Art History, University of California Los Angeles)
- Maureen Murphy (Independent Curator)
- Nicolaus Schafhausen (Artistic and Managing Director, Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam)
- Eugenio Valdes (Director of Art Education and Research, Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro)

We gratefully acknowledge the support of The Canada Council for the Arts and our Belkin Curator's Forum members. Luis Camnitzeris organized by Daros Latinamerica, Zürich, curated by Hans-Michael Herzog and Katrin Steffen.



The Future of the Contemporary is co-organized and supported by the French Consulate of France in Vancouver and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. It is made possible with assistance from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ottawa and the UBC Curatorial Lecture Series which is supported by the Faculty of Arts and the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory.



For information please contact:
Naomi Sawada, naomi.sawada@ubc.ca, tel: (604) 822-3640


Luis Camnitzer, Landscape as an Attitude, 1979.
b/w photograph, 28.1 x 35.5 cm.
Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zürich.
Photo: Peter Schälchli, Zürich.