EXCHANGE
Curated by Zoe Lukov
Produced by Water Street Projects at WSA
Downtown Manhattan
Presenting contemporary programming across the arts and culture, Water Street Projects (WSP) featured large open spaces and bands of 10-foot windows that encircled each floor, providing natural light and expansive views across New York Harbor and the surrounding cityscape.
Organized by Zoe Lukov, EXCHANGE featured newly commissioned works and performances, and large-scale installations by 8 artists. EXCHANGE explored interstitial zones of transaction and transfer as sites for the transmission of capital, labor, bodies, and energy. Leveraging its vantage point in lower Manhattan, which had long been a locus for exchanges of global ramification, the exhibition traced the percussive impacts that such exchanges as Wall Street, the Atlantic Triangle, and Ellis Island had had and continued to have on individuals, cultures, and the natural and spiritual worlds.
“Transmissions of energy, currency, and capital move our culture—which is made as much from our remembrances as it is from our forgetting,” stated Zoe Lukov. ‘’EXCHANGE highlights artists working with embodied practices that reanimate a forgotten past and insist on the power of our own mark-making: our actions as the archive, our imprints on this landscape as the sites for composting what has come before to nourish the present and ultimately imagine a place for ourselves in the future.
Presenting these works at WSA--in the heart of the Financial District and overlooking the waterways that shaped the city and the nation—creates both resonance and dissonance that adds new dimensions of exchange between the works and the sites where the financial, human, and cultural exchanges actually transpired.”
"WSP is a dynamic and post-disciplinary space that brings together a diverse range of creative fields, including performance art, visual art, and beyond. “WSP Arts Director Ruba Abu-Nimah said. “WSP is proud to present its inaugural exhibition, EXCHANGE which explores a variety of themes and identities through their interactions with the commercial epicenter of New York. This exhibition is the first of many more disruptions to come."