Inquiry

While public spaces are often designed, controlled, and surveilled by state structures and private businesses who dictate their “appropriate” use, they nonetheless remain constituted by and open to publics of all kinds—as spaces for discussion, gathering, disruption, and occupation. How to grapple with the role of individual and collective desire in thinking about public space? What happens when private spaces are opened to the public? What paradoxes about privacy, state control, urbanization, monetization, property, sovereignty, heritage, citizenship, and democracy does public space conjure? What is necessary to transform both space and society? What kinds of disruption are required? In responding to these questions, we turn to strategies activated in performance, temporary interventions, site-responsive sculpture, and protest. These approaches mobilize intimacy, transformation, and disruption. They experiment in dislocating the gallery in order to present work in unconventional environments and to challenge the production of public space within the white cube, the University campus, and the city.