Stranger Still: Care Package
The pandemic raised questions of what it means to be essential, to work, and to care — especially amongst those of us involved in cultural production. The discursive, material, managerial, social and ideational labor undertaken by curators, artists, critics, programmers, are currently regarded as non-essential work, and in epidemic centers like New York, are judged least essential, left to the last and final phase of a post-lockdown reopening.
Care Package offers artists an opportunity to reclaim notions of transmission away from epidemiological anxieties as one form of a continuing relation to each other, where the distance between cultural worker and cultural worker is expressed as solidarity, comfort, affection, empathy, gentleness, and all the other vial conditions that allow us at Grey, but not only us, to continue in the work of artistic exchange, whether in residencies or in digital habitations. Care Package invites artists to create works in response to each others’, creating an ecosystem of conversations before culminating in a final presentation. Moving away from the idea of individual productivity that being in a state of isolation seemingly propagates, the project aims to counter such notions by facilitating the opposite: a process in which artists build upon each other and form relationships that instead, cultivate a culture of care.
The project begins with the first artist initiating a ‘trigger’ work - a drawing, a model, a text, a recording - creating something before passing it on to an artist they care personally for (not just care about). The second artist receives the package and in turn creates it for another artist. The artist decides on who they want to pass it on to, with the package returning to the initial artist at intermittent points. The cascade creates a chain of responses that are documents of the distance of travel for our friendships and other intimacies, a chain conversation as objects and as exhibition.
Chain of Artists:
01. Louise Marie Lee
02. Ang Kia Yee
03. Nick Ng
04. Pat Toh
06. Tristan Lim
07. Elizabeth Chan
09. Nur Izabelle
11. Divaagar