Rehnsgatan 3

SAM PULITZER in collaboration and conversation with Bill Hayden
Friday 21 August 6 – 8 pm at RHENSGATAN 3, Stockholm
Non-Ludic Induction Site on view in the GARAGE
Performance at 7pm: moderator Inka Meissner

Non-Ludic Induction Site is an artwork produced by Bill Hayden and Sam Pulitzer, alongside a contribution by Jeff Nagy in addition to invaluable aid provided by Ben Morgan-Cleveland, for Sam Pulitzer's 2014 exhibition, "A Colony for 'Them'", at Artists Space in Manhattan, New York.

Modeled after period rooms common to institutions pledged to the conservation of certain cultural memories, this 'Antiques Platform,' as it informally came be known, served as a pivotal juncture within the exhibition's rather elaborate and potentially overwhelming experience—what with its surfeit of walls, surfaces and information. Situated in the corner, this scenic medley of authentic and fabricated antiques provided its audience a place of rest, complete with a straw mattress.

The authors of the Site constructed the work in a deliberately open-ended manner. Perhaps this anachronistic interruption of the exhibition's deliberately "contemporary" graphic identity could be understood as an evocation of punitive disciplinary injunctions such as the one for prelapsarian subjects to take a 'time-out and go sit in the corner'? Site was in fact installed in the former architectural site of the alternative institution's previous director's office, so this possible take on the work has a certain ghostly resonance, or is the Site's deployment of the stylistic cliches of "simple" living (here or elsewhere, contemporaneously or historically) within the hosting institution's administrative memories a productive coincidence? An improbable document baroquely shelved where it belongs?

Perhaps, the artists behind Site aim to spatially express a colonial mechanism at work in the memorialization of cultural milieus? That this work is a product of an unrelenting, principled search for value that merges techniques of production with those of exhibition and memory in a total conquest of cultural space? Might this campy hunk of fictitious stuff, hand-picked from Pasadena to Queens to Bucharest, induce space as an object subject to the sharing of great memories or whatever retrospective schmaltz that motivates the pickling of furniture with art while instructing children to play elsewhere?

Now, Non-Ludic Induction Site is arriving in Stockholm, Sweden—a city that brilliantly was the first to combine the zoo with the museum. A number of the work's authors will be present to conduct a live discussion, moderated by Inka Meissner, within the space of the work at the opening of the exhibition. The exhibition will also include modestly sized work by Bill Hayden.