This website represents the first stage of a multi-year project with several components. Titled The world in my street: New Urban Imaginaries, it brings together artistic and critical projects that engage the rapidly evolving social, cultural and political transactions of cities affected by globalization. The project examines the dynamics of participation and distribution as well as the evolving roles of photography, video and web-based imagery in the generation of new ways of envisioning and engaging urban situations. While the theoretical formulation of our efforts references Henri Lefebvre’s three types of spatial representation—the production of everyday life, the codifications of that life, and the liberatory conceptualizations that can be imagined and manifested—the project’s themes are also informed by the practices of the artists whose work is included; the analyses of writers engaged in particular cities and their specific histories, such as Geeta Kapur, Achille Mbembe and Cuauhtemoc Medina; and the critical perspectives of curators and other commentators and theorists such as Charles Esche, Brian Holmes, Maria Lind and Tirdad Zolghdar.  

These sixteen artists’ projects present new manifestations of urban localities. Rather than directly picture their own or other, exotic urban situations, the projects manifest alternative social dynamics and present new imaginaries in utopian proposals. The practices are activist and generative in nature, and grounded in everyday life and particular situations. In their production of differently territorialized spaces, the artists activate hidden or unseen aspects of cities and their social dimensions, and generate alternatives to official accounts and established views of the migrations of people and economic and intellectual capital.   

These artists work not only in multiple media but combine practices in their work. Some integrate different materials in essayistic constructions that locate authority in a dynamic of information exchange rather than simply document an oppositional or subterranean perspective. Others instigate performative or collaborative events that produce local change as well as documentation, then use that documentation in presentations to remote audiences—addressing them as a transnational civil society. These experimentations with documentary formulations revise notions of authenticity and reconsider ways in which alternative imaginaries can be constructed, established, circulated and reformed.

The intention of the project is the critical exploration of the impact of these new practices. The planned programs include a symposium, a multi-author book, an evolving website, multiple lectures and panels, and a touring exhibition of selected artistic projects.  We have begun our research in Delhi, Johannesburg, Mexico City and Mumbai and, although the project is focused on artistic projects rather than cities, we anticipate working in other locations, among them Berlin, Rotterdam and Tokyo.

This project has been supported by a grant from the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, a program of the Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, and administered by The University of the Arts, Philadelphia; and by a grant from the Samuel F. Fels Fund. In addition, Temple University and Tyler School of Art provide ongoing support.

Credits:

Project Director: Sheryl Conkelton
Project Manager: Shayna McConville

Website producer: Laura Deutch
Website design: Tony Smyrski, Smyski Productions
Research: Laura Deutch, Josh Brilliant, Sheryl Conkelton, Shayna McConville, Omar Rodriguez, Jen Willett
Website construction: Louis Cook

The world in my street roundtable
Temple University, November 9, 2009. 

Project Roundtable
November 11, 2008
Tuttleman Learning Center
Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US 

Program
2 pm Welcome and introductions
2:15   Presentations
3        Discussion of the website and project
3:45   Break – 15 minutes
4        Discussion of theory and practices   
4:45   Summary and close

Participants

Shaina Anand, filmmaker and artist
mail@chitrakarkhana.net 
John Caperton, Curator of Prints and Photographs, Print Center
jcaperton@printcenter.org
Katherine Carl, art historian and curator
katherine@thenao.net
Sheryl Conkelton, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs, Tyler School of Art
sherylco@temple.edu
Roderick Coover, Assistant Professor, Film and Media Arts, Temple University
rcoover@temple.edu
Laura Deutch, Samuel S. Fels Fellow: Website Project Producer, the world in my street
ldeutch@temple.edu
Ismail Farouk, urban geographer and artist
ismail.farouk@gmail.com
Philip Glahn, Associate Professor, Painting, Drawing and Sculpture, Tyler School of Art
phglahn@temple.edu
Jesse Goldstein, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the City University of New York
jesse@space1026.com
Nadia Hironaka, Professor, Maryland Institute of Fine Arts and co-founder of Screening
nadianod@yahoo.com
Barbara London, Associate Curator, Film and Video, Museum of Modern Art, New York
barbara_london@yahoo.com
Lorie Mertes, Rochelle F. Levy Director and Chief Curator, the Galleries at Moore
lmertes@moore.edu
Jenelle Porter, Associate Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania
jenelle@upenn.edu
Scott Rigby, artist and co-Director of Basekamp
scott@basekamp.com
Anthony Smysrki, art director, filmmaker, and independent book/magazine publisher
tony@tonysmyrski.com
Marko Stamenkovic, independent curator and writer
marko.stamenkovic@gmail.com
Ashok Sukumaran, artist
ashok@out.in
Matthew Suib, artist and co-founder of Screening
msuib@hotmail.com
Adelina Vlas, Assistant Curator, Philadelphia Museum of Art
avlas@philamuseum.org
Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Assistant Professor, Architecture, Tyler School of Art
srdjan@thenao.net
 

Tyler Exhibitions and Public Programs

The mission of Tyler School of Art’s Exhibitions and Public Programs department (Tyler Exhibitions) is to explore and encourage experimentation in artistic practice and interpretation. The department provides a platform for young artists, curators and critics to produce and present their work, as well as a forum for the larger Philadelphia community to examine the most recent developments in contemporary art and their relationships to broader cultural contexts.

The program’s starting point is the exploration of significant artistic, presentational and critical practices. Our programming is designed to engage an array of constituencies as participants and audiences in an evolving conversation about the changing circumstances of art, artists and artmaking. We are also committed to providing a sustained dialogue between the region and ideas and individuals that circulate nationally and internationally.

Exhibitions are a key feature of the program; they are organized and presented on a regular basis by staff as well as visiting curators and scholars at our downtown facility, Temple Gallery; in addition, projects based on collaborations are offered occasionally in other locations around the city. Programming includes lectures, roundtables, symposia, events and in-gallery commentaries. In addition, the department commissions artists and hosts them in residencies on an occasional basis (so far, biennially), so they might create work while engaging our students, visitors and participants in longer-term and deeper conversations about their ongoing work and specific projects. We publish essays in brochures that accompany the Temple Gallery exhibitions and are available free of charge to the public, as well as on our Website, and make background information available in the gallery and on the Web.

Our current program engages artistic and presentational practices as starting points. It looks at the dynamics of artistic production and its multiple manifestations as well as at current curatorial and institutional strategies. Among the artists whose works we have shown in the last three years are Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Cory Arcangel, Phil Collins, Tony Cokes, Jesper Just, Rachid Koraichi, Pedro Lasch, Seth Price, Anri Sala and Berni Searle.  We have commissioned a number of curators to expand our conversation with artists and audiences, among them Elizabeth Thomas, who organized Empathetic in 2006 to explore the production of artists interested in emotional and social exchange; Jesse Goldstein (a founding member of Space 1026, a collaborative studio in Philadelphia) who in 2007 organized Manybody, comprising community-activist projects from around North America; and Salah Hassan, director of Africana Studies, Cornell University, to organize a program of events, RePrint, RePresent, ReView, in 2007, including an exhibition of works commissioned by three artists working in the history of African diaspora in the Philadelphia.