The New York-based non-profit public art producer Creative Time announced today that Elvira Dyangani Ose has joined as senior curator. Ose lectures on visual arts at Goldsmiths, University of London and is a member the curatorial group Thought Council at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. Ose will collaborate with Nato Thompson—who joined Creative Time in 2007 and has now been promoted to artistic director—to further shape how the institution engages with the public to develop works of art. In an interview with The Art Newspaper, Ose gives us an idea of what she plans to achieve in New York. What kinds of projects do you hope to realise in New York, in the short-term and long-term?
My aim is to first contribute to the extraordinary programming that is already underway, and to begin formulating two new major public art interventions for 2019. I'll also be working with Katie Hollander and Nato Thompson, in particular, in fostering a larger conversation that we are hoping to have at a global scale.
I’ll take ‘New York’ to mean, instead, the abstraction of the contemporary city. From that perspective, imagine the city dwellers, the various communities, their capacity to overcome the parameters of a state-dominated space, the potential of their everyday actions to politically challenge the homogeneity of such space and the need for citizens to claim their ‘difference’—to claim their right to the city. My interest, particularly at this sociopolitical juncture, is beginning to interrogate those aspects before even starting to think of a project.
Are there historically—or symbolically—important areas of New York that you want to focus on?
I'm always guided by a sense of urgency in my curatorial projects. The interaction, the living together of individuals and collectives is what make a place a city, even __more than urban landmarks. While the historical and political significance of certain spaces is fundamental, I have always been much __more interested in the intangible; in what we can do with what constitutes memory, intuition, aspiration, knowledge. Tribute in Light (2002), [a memorial work for 9/11], for instance, was a painful reminder of the power of memory, of the presence of the immaterial.
Why is public art important today?
Exercising the right to the city is crucial to the definition of public art, whether in Lubumbashi [in the Democratic Republic of Congo] or New York. Writing about Nick Cave’s work—who did HEARD-NY with Creative Time in Grand Central Station—I recalled the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s understanding of the city. He saw Paris, in May 1968, as a subject falling apart. Lefebvre, like Cave, demands a new humanism, one that uses urban appropriation and the traces of collective experience in the city map. There is a sense of informality and togetherness that has dominated everyday life in places like Lubumbashi or Gugulethu [in Cape Town, South Africa], and I hope that will have more to offer to New York and its public-ness than the other way around.