No Longer Empty is delighted to participate in the Governors Island Summer Festival which opens to the public on June 5 - October 10, 2010, with a multi location public art exhibition, a film serie, children workshop and more events to follow. To learn more about the exhibition's theme, please email press@nolongerempty.org

The Sixth Borough, cuarted by Manon Slome and Julian Navarro, entails a series of site specific installations, the parallel realities of the mainland and the Island which exist in spatial proximity but in different states of being. Visitors feel this sense of dislocation from the moment they step off of the ferry after just a few minutes ride.

The selection of artists and artistic interventions in all media, are intended to address this sense of displacement while exploring notions of memory, residual entities of the past and transitions between worlds. See below for programming.

UPCOMING Performance | "Uryonstelaii" by Pablo Helguera

October 2 starting at 12:30,1:30, 2:30 and 3:30 at the Arsenal

In 1660, a mysterious sect of Dutch mystics arrived on an island in the New World with the objective of creating a new society.

Their governing principle revolved around the uninterrupted performance of a single dramatic work in seven tableau' vivants. Invoking alchemical imagery and hermetic thought, their goal was to arrive upon a higher state of being by collectively embodying the symbolic representation of all of human and divine knowledge. Their experiment, which would last a century, would test the human boundaries of time, physical endurance, and the collective commitment toward an idea.

“Like a ‘lamb in wolf ’s clothing,’ Pablo Helguera uses the e'oteric mechanisms of historical erudition to lure us to his magical island of the Ourobourians. But right about the time we lose our footing on the land’s slippery shores when we begin to wonder if the artist has gleaned an esoteric tradition for more than just source material for his island’s symbols and nomenclature, when we start to navigate his land with the non-verbal hunches of the alchemists’ score, and call into question the arti!ces we employ to gather the world around us we realize Helguera has really taken us on a journey to another land altogether, the most forbidden of places: the self.”

-Lise Patt, founder and director of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Los Angeles

“Pablo Helguera is a splendid liar, a first-class storyteller, a curious mind constantly in search of stories, a creator of parallel universes and impossible characters living in credible situations, which invariably probe our certainties, intuition and knowledge.”
-Naief Tehya, writer and critic

ONGOING | Mary Walling Blackburn's Radical Citizenship

Over 25 tutors, ranging from archaeologists to musicians, artists to ecologists, will provide one-on-one tutorials with visitors to Governor's island. Each tutor will offer a separate deconstruction of citizenship, offering abstract and concrete examples and investigations of radical citizenship, an unregulated form of belonging. Some tutorials will be broadcast real-time by a radio transmitter throughout the island, allowing other visitors to listen in via portable radios from the lawns. This expands the classroom into something simultaneously intimate and "long distance." Both coasts will be simultaneously activated, in August and September, when Anhoek School offers tutorials on Angel Island, the historic site of immigration processing for the West. In NYC, the triangulation of Governor's Island, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, both geographically and symbolically, point towards an investigation of citizenship—as practice rather than status.

On both sites, each tutor creates their own tutorial that elaborates on their own specific interpretation of the topic and what information they wish to discuss with their student/collaborator/visitor. The length of time will be a joint decision, negotiated on site.

Adjacent to the room where the tutorials take place, a waiting room, of sorts. After each tutorial, the objects within the waiting room alter; the chairs, water cooler, and remains of the performances move according to the subject of the tutorial and the remains of previous tutorials.

Tutorial are in Building 408, 2nd floor every weekend from 12 to 4pm. Check website to see the name of the tutor.

ONGOING | Not a Place, An Outlook (see full programming)

September 10-11-12 | September 17-18-19
From 12 - 5pm, every 30 minutes at the Fort Jay Theater

A schedule of short films titled Not a Place, An Outlook will be curated by Regine Basha will consider No Longer Empty's site-specific curatorial framework. A collection of ten films will be shown in two viewings, each lasting for half an hour. Films in consideration include Julieta Aranda’s Film on Kiribati Island, Javier Tellez’s Caligari and the Sleepwalker. Also films by Jenny Perlin, Steve Roden, Alan Michelson and Erin Shirreff.

The films will reflect on place as a state of mind, temporal dislocations, simultaneity, history running backwards, and slowness. Included in the Sunday program is a rare set of screenings by experimental filmmaker, Luke Fowler, selected by invited guest, Christoph Cox.

Regine Basha is an independent curator based in Brooklyn. See www.bashaprojects.com. Christoph Cox, Professor of Philosophy, teaches and writes on contemporary European philosophy and contemporary art and music.

Performance |"down" by Marina Rosenfeld

As part of the film program "Not A Place, AnOutlook", Marina Rosenfeld's solo performance will take the measure of the "down" times, or interstitial durations between scheduled film projections inside the island's little-used Fort Jay Theater and use these as a structure for a musical composition. Mixing LPs and original sound, Rosenfeld's performance responds to the theater's ambiance of disuse and the series' variety of approaches to time and silence.

Approx 30 min. More information

Childrens Workshop on Governors Island | Woven Reflections

Installation | "WHY X WHY" by Clive Murphy
 
Murphy has created a large kinetic inflatable sculpture crafted from a multitude of common Home Depot trash bags. This vast lo-tech structure has been created in situ as a specific reaction to the architecture of the Arsenal Building, employing modular geometric forms to invoke drama and pathos through simplicity, scale and motion.

Friday, Saturday & Sunday : June 18, 19, 20, and 25, 26, 27
The Arsenal is Building 110 (right by the  Soisson Dock).

SPECIAL PROGRAMMING |Trong Nguyen's broadcasting of Bravo TV "Work of Art"