Take Me (I’m Yours) Programs Feature Artist Christian Boltanski, Curator Nicolas Bourriaud, and More

New York, NY – In conjunction with its new exhibition, Take Me (I’m Yours), the Jewish Museum will present a series of public programs, including a lecture by noted curator Nicolas Bourriaud on September 29, and a conversation with artist Christian Boltanski, who mounted the exhibition in its original form in 1995 (with Hans Ulrich Obrist), exhibition co-curator Jens Hoffmann on December 15.  Other highlights include discussions with exhibition artists Rachel Rose and Haim Steinbach on September 22 and Uri Aran and Ian Cheng on January 19; and a concert with Pauline Oliveros on November 10.

All programs take place at the Jewish Museum. Further program and ticket information is available by calling 212.423.3337 or online at TheJewishMuseum.org/calendar.  The Jewish Museum is located at Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street, Manhattan.

This fall, the Jewish Museum is upending museum conventions with Take Me (I’m Yours), an exhibition featuring artworks that visitors are asked to touch, participate in, and even take home. On view from September 16, 2016 through February 5, 2017, Take Me (I’m Yours) will feature a group of 42 international and intergenerational artists working in a variety of media including sculpture, works on paper, installation, performance, and digital media. Many of the artists are creating new and site-specific works for the exhibition. On average, 10,000 of each work will be produced for visitors to take away. Over the course of four months, artworks will be replenished so what awaits visitors will constantly evolve. Selected artists include Uri Aran, Christian Boltanski, Andrea Bowers, Andrea Fraser, General Sisters, Gilbert & George, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jonathan Horowitz, Alison Knowles, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Jonas Mekas, Yoko Ono, Rachel Rose, Martha Rosler, Tino Sehgal, Haim Steinbach, Amalia Ulman, and Lawrence Weiner, among others (see below for complete list).

TAKE ME (I’M YOURS) PROGRAM SCHEDULE

Writers and Artists Respond: Rachel Rose and Haim Steinbach
Thursday, September 22, 6:30pm
Artists Rachel Rose and Haim Steinbach speak about their work in the context of the exhibition Take Me (I’m Yours), in a conversation with Kelly Taxter, Associate Curator and exhibition co-curator.

Rachel Rose’s videos investigate subjects ranging from zoos and cryogenics, the American Revolutionary War and 19th century park design, Philip Johnson’s Glass House, EDM concerts, and the sensory experience of walking in outer space. Through the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated events, Rose’s work presents humanity’s shared current anxieties and their multi-layered interconnectivity around our own mortality now. Recent solo exhibitions include: Rachel Rose at The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; Everything and More at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); Palisades at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London (2015); and Interiors at Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2015). Forthcoming exhibitions include Pilar Corrias Gallery, London (2016); Museu Serralves, Porto (2016); the Hayward Gallery, London (2016); and the São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo (2016).

Haim Steinbach has been an influential exponent of art based on already existing objects. Since the late 1970s Steinbach’s art has been focused on the selection and arrangement of objects, above all everyday objects. In order to enhance their interplay and resonance, he has been conceiving structures and framing devices for them. Steinbach presents objects ranging from the natural to the ordinary, the artistic to the ethnographic, giving form to art works that underscore their identities and inherent meanings. Exploring the psychological, aesthetic, cultural and ritualistic aspects of objects as well as their context, Steinbach has radically redefined the status of the object in art.

Free with Pay-What-You-Wish Admission; RSVP Recommended


Lecture: Nicolas Bourriaud
Coactivities: The Relational Sphere and the Internet of Objects
Thursday, September 29, 6:30pm
Celebrated theorist, art historian and curator Nicolas Bourriaud speaks about the concept of Relational Aesthetics in relationship to art and the digital sphere in the context of the exhibition Take Me (I’m Yours).

French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud was co-founder, and from 1999-2006 served as co-director of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. He was also founder and director of the contemporary art magazine Documents sur l'art, and correspondent in Paris for Flash Art from 1987 to 1995. Bourriaud was the Gulbenkian Curator of Contemporary Art at Tate Britain from 2007-2010, and in 2009 he curated the fourth Tate Triennial there, entitled Altermodern. He was the Director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, from 2011 to 2015. In 2015, he was appointed director of the future Contemporary Art Center of Montpellier, France, due to open in 2019, and director of La Panacée art center.

Free with Pay-What-You-Wish Admission; RSVP Recommended


Concert
Bang on a Can: Performance by Pauline Oliveros
Thursday, November 10, 7:30 pm
Bang on a Can and the Jewish Museum are presenting a concert by Pauline Oliveros in conjunction with Take Me (I’m Yours). Oliveros will perform The Sound of Meditation on V-Accordion, an instrument that produces both accordion and orchestral sounds. The concert blurs the boundary between the performer and the audience by asking the listener to participate in the making of music.

Pauline Oliveros’s career spans fifty years of boundary dissolving music making.  Recipient of the John Cage award for 2012 from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, Oliveros is Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College.  She has been as interested in finding new sounds as in finding new uses for old ones --her primary instrument is the accordion, an unexpected visitor perhaps to musical cutting edge. Since the 1960s she has influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual.

Tickets: $18 general; $15 students and seniors; $12 Jewish Museum and Bang on a Can Members


Dialogue and Discourse: Christian Boltanski and Jens Hoffmann
Thursday, December 15, 6:30 pm
The Jewish Museum's installation of Take Me (I'm Yours) is discussed by Christian Boltanski, who with along with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist originated Take Me (I’m Yours) in 1995 at the Serpentine Galleries, London, and Jens Hoffmann, Director of Special Exhibitions and Public Programs, the Jewish Museum, and co-curator of the current exhibition.

Photographer, painter, sculptor, and installation artist Christian Boltanski was born in Paris on September 6, 1944, to a Ukrainian Jewish father and a Corsican mother.  Boltanski’s work deals with the concepts of loss, memory, childhood, and death, often functioning as memorials or shrines to collective cultural rituals and events. Many of his installations may reference the lives lost in the Holocaust, striking both collective societal and personal chords.  His first solo exhibition, La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski (The Impossible Life of Christian Boltanski), was held at the Thétre le Ranelagh, Paris in 1968.   Since the 1970s Boltanski has been included in a number of important shows, exhibiting the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1970); Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany (1972); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany (1973); Venice Biennale Architettura (1975). And Documenta 8, Kassel (1987).  More recently he has had solo shows at the Institut Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt, Germany (2006); La maison rouge, Fondation Antoine de Galbert, Paris (2008); and Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein, Vaduz (2009). Boltanski lives and works in the Malakoff neighborhood of Paris with his wife, Annette Messager, with whom he occasionally collaborates on projects.

Jens Hoffmann joined the Jewish Museum in November 2012. Formerly Director of the CCA-Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco from 2007 to 2012 and Director of Exhibitions and Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London from 2003 to 2007, Hoffmann has organized more than 50 shows internationally including major biennials like the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011) and the 9th Shanghai Biennial (2012).  Shows curated at the Jewish Museum include Other Primary Structures (2014), Repetition and Difference (2015), Unorthodox (2016), Roberto Burle Marx: Brazilian Modernist (2016), and Take Me (I’m Yours) (2016).

Free with Pay-What-You-Wish Admission; RSVP Recommended


Adult Studio Art Workshp: Art for Sharing
Sunday, December 4, 1:30pm – 5:30 pm
Inspired by concepts of generosity, metaphor, and communication found in Take Me (I’m Yours) and taught by Golnar Adili, participants will create artworks in multiples that can serve as gifts for the holidays.

Golnar Adili has been an artist in residence at the Rockefeller Foundation for the Arts, Smack Mellon, the MacDowell Colony, Lower East Side Printshop, and Women’s Studio Workshop. She received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Puffin Foundation Grant, and the Urban Artist Initiative grant. Adili’s work has been shown at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in LA, Cue Art Foundation, International Print Center in NY, Brooklyn Arts Council, and the Lower East Side Printshop. Her upcoming solo exhibition at the Kentler International Drawing Space in Brooklyn, NY will open September 9, 2016.  Adili lives in Brooklyn.

Course Fee: $90 general; $75 Jewish Museum members
All materials included


Writers and Artists Respond: Uri Aran and Ian Cheng
Thursday, January 19, 6:30pm
Artists Uri Aran and Ian Cheng speak about their work in the context of the exhibition Take Me (I’m Yours), in a conversation with Kelly Taxter, Associate Curator and exhibition co-curator.

Uri Aran’s installations collect objects and images, sculptural elements that are structured by the wall-mounted pedestals and worktables that provide the environment for the work. Unfolding like a theatrical storyboard, these configurations evoke fragments of narrative. Exhibitions include the 2014 Whitney Biennial and Liverpool Biennial, and the 2013 Venice Biennale. Aran was born in Jerusalem and lives and works in New York.

Ian Cheng has been included in group exhibitions at MOCA, Cleveland (2016); Hirshhorn Museum, Washington (2016); Musee d’Moderne Paris (2015); MoMA PS1, New York (2013); and Sculpture Center, New York (2012), and has received solo shows in Milan, Oslo, London, Dusseldorf, Los Angeles, and Miami Beach.  Ian Cheng was born in Los Angeles and lives and works in New York.

Free with Pay-What-You-Wish Admission; RSVP Recommended

Gallery Talks
45-minute gallery discussions on specific themes and topics related to Take Me (I’m Yours), led by members of the Museum’s Education Department.

Touch, Taste, Talk: Art for the Body
Fridays, October 7, November 4, and January 20, 2pm

Framing and Reframing
Fridays, October 21, December 16, and February 3, 2pm

Free with Museum Admission – RSVP Recommended


Support
Take Me (I'm Yours) is made possible by AIG Private Client Group, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Amanda and Glenn Fuhrman, Midge and Simon Palley, Charlotte Feng Ford, and Ann and Mel Schaffer.  Additional support is provided through the Melva Bucksbaum Fund for Contemporary Art and the Leon Levy Foundation.

Public programs are made possible by endowment support from the William Petschek Family, the Trustees of the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation, Barbara and Benjamin Zucker, the late William W. Hallo, the late Susanne Hallo Kalem, the late Ruth Hallo Landman, the Marshall M. Weinberg Fund, with additional support from Marshall M. Weinberg, the Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Foundation, the Saul and Harriet M. Rothkopf Family Foundation, and Ellen Liman. Additional support is provided by Lorraine and Martin Beitler and through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.