Remy Jungerman participates in Prospect.3: Notes for Now, an international contemporary art biennial in New Orleans.

Sat, Oct 25 - Sun, Jan 25  2015

From October 25 until January 25, 8 works by Remy Jungerman are on view at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans as a part of the P.3 Notes for Now biennial in New Orleans.

About Remy Jungerman

Remy Jungerman (b. 1959, Suriname) lives and works in Amsterdam. He attended the Academy for Higher Arts and Cultural Studies, Paramaribo (Suriname), before moving to Amsterdam where he studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. His work explores both Afro-diasporic culture and the Western modernist art tradition. Since his first group exhibition in the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, Jungerman has participated in several solo and group exhibitions worldwide. In 2008 he received the Fritschy Culture Award from the Museum het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands. At the biennial his work is on view at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans on the second floor.

About Prospect. 3: Notes for Now Prospect.3

Notes for Now (P.3) is an international contemporary art biennial. P.3 will feature the work of 58 artists selected by Artistic Director Franklin Sirmans in 18 venues located throughout New Orleans

 “What is the nature of the search, you ask? Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” – Binx Bolling, The Moviegoer 

In Walker Percy’s 1961 novel The Moviegoer, the protagonist Binx Bolling is consumed by “the search” in the week leading up to his thirtieth birthday. Pointedly, the birthday falls on Ash Wednesday—the day after the most important holiday in New Orleans, Mardi Gras. Though Binx’s attendance at the carnival is peripheral, there’s much to be learned from his vantage point at the margins of the crowd. Bolling, a solitary moviegoer, lives his life on the margin, slowly creeping closer to the center as he embraces “the search.” He begins the book in the isolated suburbs of New Orleans, comfortably away, and apart from other people’s lives, but finds solace in the contested city by its end. The novel, set in a time of heightened social awareness in the first half of the decade’s movement for civil rights in America, delves into the depths of existentialism in a world where people were legally segregated from each other, making it impossible to celebrate the individual. “The peculiar institution” of slavery and immigration during the 18th century created a city that, even in 1961, was a complex social arrangement, one that remains palpable today. The third Prospect biennial (P.3) is invested in and will explore ‘the search’ to find the self and the necessity of the other as part of that quest.

 It is New Orleans’ distinct history that makes it an illuminating source of philosophical inquiry for the present. Percy, a student of Soren Kierkegaard and acolyte of Jean-Paul Sartre, was attempting to “explore the dislocation of man in the modern age,” and certainly the physical and psychological violence we do to each other is one of the continuing facets of our species’ ‘dislocation.’ The “search” in Prospect.3 (P.3) also aims to further explore a philosophical inquiry on humanity, an effort to interrogate human feelings and human relationships. Recognizing the position of P.3 as a biennial-type exhibition for the United States—passionately committed to being international in scope and weary of geographic location as something that is increasingly interchangeable in today’s world of contemporary art—Prospect.3 is, in the mode of past Prospect projects, vitally committed to the city of New Orleans. Placed at the foot of the Mississippi River on the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans’ influx of people has been remarkable in its diversity, and unlike any other American city. As a node for thinking through global issues, New Orleans offers an example that is revelatory, generative and frictional.

Guided by several curatorial themes, P.3’s exhibitions, site-specific installations and new works will address: The New Orleans Experience, Seeing Oneself in the Other, The South, Crime and Punishment, Movie going, The Carnivalesque, Abstraction, Visual Sound, and will seamlessly tie together the largesse of the show through commissions by several artists under the moniker, All Together Now.