Bernadette Corporation
27 March - 09 June 2013
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Reloaded, 2012. Bernadette Corporation with Benjamin Alexander Huseby.
Courtesy the artists and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York; Cabinet,
London; Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna; Galerie NEU, Berlin. |
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BERNADETTE CORPORATION
2000 Wasted Years
27 March - 9 June 2013
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2000 Wasted Years is the first UK retrospective by the New York based
Bernadette Corporation. The exhibition recasts the works authored by the
group since their inception in the early '90s.
The origins of Bernadette Corporation lie in the organisation of parties
in downtown New York, their mock incorporation and ambiguous branding
strategies developing in the mid '90s into a women’s fashion line. Their
engagement in quotation, concepts, fictions, appropriation,
provocation, hoaxes, and anti-artistic postures of crass commercialism
have subsequently seen them move within the fields of magazine
publishing, film production, political activism, literature and the
market-driven art world.
Across Bernadette Corporation’s twenty-year history and mutable
membership there runs a thread of anonymity and opacity, the rejection
of normative social forms and appellations such as being an artist, or a
political activist. This 'whatever' subjectivity is as evident in the
twenty-something museum guard turned model/muse anti-heroine of their
2004 novel Reena Spaulings, as it is in the radicality of Black Bloc
anarchists at the heart of the 2003 film Get Rid of Yourself.
2000 Wasted Years uses 'retrospection' as another turn in the corporate
subjectivity of Bernadette Corporation. A lyrically and conceptually
complex relay of the quotidian continues to engage the collective today,
all the while underscored by the 'reality' of Bernadette Corporation
both as a group of relationships, and as brand.
Exhibition design by Gideon Ponte/Magnet
Graphic design by Bill Hayden
An Artists Space, New York exhibition, in co-production with Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
Curated by Stefan Kalmár and Richard Birkett of Artists Space, New York with Gregor Muir and Matt Williams of ICA, London
With thanks to the Bernadette Corporation Exhibition Supporters Group
www.ica.org.uk
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