Open Sessions is made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Faber- Castell, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Open Sessions continues with artist-directed group exhibitions. Open Sessions 6 features the work of Amadeo Azar, Daniel Barroca, Youmna Chlala, Lea Cetera, Onyedika Chuke, Alexandra Lerman, Harold Mendez, Marcelo Moscheta, and Ronny Quevedo.
Amadeo Azar explores the interrelation between the visual languages of modernism with political and social movements in Latin America, and the way those Utopian moments were disrupted as they encountered local circumstances. Daniel Barroca works with memory and history. His projects map forces anchored by images, objects, words, historical figures, and ideas. Lea Cetera produces temporal installations that examine the mediation of technology and the alienation of the human body. Through recent installations that include filmed performances, the artist attempts to create an alienating/disorienting illusory effect. Youmna Chlala investigates architecture and fate. Her work is situated in places or bodies that translate themselves against or through an external world that is constantly trying to name them. Onyedika Chuke has been assembling an archive termed “The Forever Museum”—a collection of objects and images based on Internet-sourced documents that redistribute images and theories pertaining to civilizations, political rebellions, riots, and warfare. Alexandra Lerman proposes clay as a discursive medium. Her ink circulation drawings and "memory negatives" use copyrighted and patented systems to explore the complexities of contemporary body language and refer to the body located within institutional and natural environments. Harold Mendez draws upon ideas of absence and displacement to reference reconstructions of place and identity in the United States and Latin America, with a focus on how the past manifests in the present, and thereby trigger new inquiry. Marcelo Moscheta excavates the memories inscribed in the stone paths left by the ancient civilizations and uses GPS coordinates to draw his displacement over the surface of the planet. Ronny Quevedo traces culture through history, language, and mapping. Using a variety of forms from personal anecdotes to colloquialisms, coats of arms to store signage, games to modules, his work addresses concepts of displacement.
Open Sessions is organized by Nova Benway and Lisa Sigal, Open Sessions Curators