• Take Me (I’m Yours) – The Jewish Museum, NY

    Date posted: September 21, 2016 Author: jolanta
    Installation view of the exhibition Take Me (I'm Yours). September 16, 2016 – February 5, 2017. The Jewish Museum, NY. Photo by: David Heald.
    Installation view of the exhibition Take Me (I'm Yours). September 16, 2016 – February 5, 2017. The Jewish Museum, NY. Photo by: David Heald.

    In this highly unconventional exhibition, visitors are encouraged to participate, touch, and even take home works of art by 42 international and intergenerational artists, many of whom are creating new and site-specific works for the exhibition.

    In a conventional museum experience, you, the visitor, may consume art only by looking at the paintings, sculptures, or photographs on view. You are not allowed to touch the works, and certainly not able to take them home. In defiance of this well-established standard, Take Me (I’m Yours) extends an invitation. Featuring works by more than forty artists from different generations and from all over the world, the exhibition asks you not only to get into close contact with the artworks, but to take them away and keep them for good.

    Take Me (I’m Yours) aims to create a democratic space for all visitors to take ownership of artworks, and curate their personal art collections, by subverting the usual politics of value, consumerism, and the museum experience. Visitors constantly transform the landscape of the galleries, bit by bit, through direct engagement.

    This presentation builds upon an iconic exhibition of the same name that took place in 1995 at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Conceived by the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and the artist Christian Boltanski, it included works by twelve artists, several of whom are participating again here. Obrist and Boltanski took inspiration from a host of histories and ideologies related to possession, from the anarchist idea that “ownership is theft” to the post-1960s dematerialization of the object in conceptual art.

    Installation view of the exhibition Take Me (I'm Yours). September 16, 2016 – February 5, 2017. The Jewish Museum, NY. Photo by: David Heald.

    Installation view of the exhibition Take Me (I’m Yours). September 16, 2016 – February 5, 2017. The Jewish Museum, NY. Photo by: David Heald.

    Restaging this exhibition at the Jewish Museum, a collecting institution with holdings that span centuries, offers occasion to rethink the role of the museum as an archive. Instead of collecting works and preserving them for all eternity, we are giving them away. Sharing pervades Jewish life, beginning in the home and extending out to the community. Here the exhibition is the home, and the works are what we share with you, our visitors.

    Jens Hoffmann
    Director of Special Exhibitions and Public Programs, the Jewish Museum

    Hans Ulrich Obrist
    Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London

    Kelly Taxter
    Associate Curator, the Jewish Museum
    Participating Artists

    aaajiao
    Kelly Akashi
    Uri Aran
    Dana Awartani
    Cara Benedetto
    Christian Boltanski
    Andrea Bowers
    James Lee Byars
    Luis Camnitzer
    Ian Cheng
    Heman Chong
    Maria Eichhorn
    Hans-Peter Feldmann
    Claire Fontaine
    Andrea Fraser
    General Sisters
    Gilbert & George
    Felix Gonzalez-Torres
    Matthew Angelo Harrison
    Yngve Holen
    Carsten Höller
    Jonathan Horowitz
    Jibade-Khalil Huffman
    Alex Israel
    Koo Jeong A
    Alison Knowles
    Angelika Markul
    Adriana Martinez
    Daniel Joseph Martinez
    Jonas Mekas
    Rivane Neuenschwander
    Yoko Ono
    Sondra Perry
    Rachel Rose
    Martha Rosler
    Allan Ruppersberg
    Tino Sehgal
    Daniel Spoerri
    Haim Steinbach
    Rirkrit Tiravanija
    Amalia Ulman
    Lawrence Weiner
    Gallery Performances

    James Lee Byars, Be Quiet, 1980
    Saturdays, noon – 4 pm

    Sondra Perry
    Date and time to be announced
    #TakeMeImYoursNYC

    Take Me (I’m Yours) is made possible by AIG Private Client Group, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Amanda and Glenn Fuhrman, Midge and Simon Palley, Charlotte Feng Ford, Ann and Mel Schaffer, Royal Norwegian Consulate General in New York, and our Kickstarter community of supporters.

    Additional support is provided through the Melva Bucksbaum Fund for Contemporary Art and the Leon Levy Foundation.


    Courtesy of the Jewish Museum

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