In this distributed exhibition project, given modes of production, circulation, and consumption were “hijacked” or re-appropriated for creative purposes, similar to how parasites borrow their hosts' bodies and metabolism for their own purposes. Instead of assuming that the localities of public interventions can be "shipped" to a single gallery space, the participating artists enacted their interventions in a network of distributed places, operating in the same time frame. This tactical approach to time and space started from the realization that there is a significant lack of platforms and opportunities to show and promote nonconventional and noncommercial creative practices and that such practices can better encounter publics and build a network without relying on the traditional gallery system and its geopolitical and economic constraints.

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We share an interest in reappropriating conventional ways of using or occupying public spaces, systems, or mass-produced commodities for unexpected purposes, which may denaturalize routinized patterns of everyday life. By twisting common assumptions or repeated habits of the everyday, we attempt to disturb how things are supposed to be and how we are expected to live and communicate. In doing so, we would like to bring attention to imaginative and contingent qualities of everyday life.

 

Our practices as ‘para-sites’ range across various media or genres, including performance acts, apparatuses, site-specific installations, wheat-pastes, gifs, video projection, community events, augmented reality applications, and short stories. The distributed places also formed a broad network of eclectic places from Australia to France, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, New Zealand, South Korea, and the United States.

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Curator: Yunjin La-mei Woo

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Participants:  Adelin Schweitzer (Deletere Group), Broooks Wenzel (AKA Yoidles! Productions), Gavin Rouille, ETC, Kara J. Schmidt, osvaldo cibils, Ralf Sander, Shannon Novak, Weird Shift (Carl Diehl, Rosalynn Rothstein, Adam Rothstein), Wes Modes, Yunjin La-mei Woo, Zachary Davidson & Seth Daulton

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Official website: http://para-sites.org

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Curatorial Essay: "Four Porous Bodies and Their Parasites" by Yunjin La-mei Woo