Kara Hamilton and Angie Keefer, Heavy Fixture, 2015.
Accompaniment explores accompaniment as an evolving theory of practice, developed in response to our contemporary cultural and political milieu. Curated by Kari Cwynar and Kendra Sullivan, the project asks, might an artistic practice characterized by distributed authorship be a catalyst for a methodological shift in the ways we produce, exhibit, and write about art? This exhibition enacts accompaniment such that the physical, historical, and social supports within individual practices are made manifest, but also so that each participant and contribution inevitably accompanies and is accompanied in the present within the group. This model subverts the order of the soloist, laying bare a deeply stratified ground in which everything created is inscribed and contingent.
Kari Cwynar is a curator, writer, and editor based in Toronto, where she is director of Kunstverein Toronto and assistant editor of C Magazine. Since opening in June 2014, Kunstverein Toronto has realized exhibitions, publications, and performances with Raimundas Malasauskas, Marcos Lutyens, Angie Keefer, Steve Kado, Tamara Henderson, Maryse Lariviere, Carolee Schneemann, and Tyler Coburn. Cwynar completed her MA in art history at Carleton University and later participated in the de Appel curatorial program in Amsterdam. She has held curatorial and research positions at the Banff Centre, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. As a writer, Cwynar contributes to catalogues and periodicals on contemporary art, including Frieze, C Magazine, and Metropolis M.
Kendra Sullivan is a writer, artist, curator, and boatmaker living in Brooklyn. Her writing has recently appeared in BOMB, F. R. DAVID, and Martha Rosler's Gar(b)age Sale Standard, and her artwork has been presented at Bureau for Open Culture, MASS MoCA; Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts; and tenletters, Glasgow. Sullivan works with the Center for the Humanities and the James Gallery at the CUNY Graduate Center to coordinate public programs, conferences, and the Mellon Seminar in Public Engagement. She is associate publisher of Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a member of the art collective Mare Liberum, and cofounder of the Sunview Luncheonette.