Winter 2020 Opening Celebration – ICA Philadelphia
The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania welcomes you to celebrate the opening of our Winter 2020 exhibition season, comprised of the exhibitions Karyn Olivier: Everything That’s Alive Moves, Trevor Shimizu: Performance Artist, and the continuation of Michelle Lopez: Ballast & Barricades.
5PM | Members Preview
6:30PM | Public Opening CelebrationLike people, monuments can reward history, retell valor, honor loss, be displaced, and expire. Karyn Olivier’s recent thinking has been centered on civic space—specifically monuments and memorials, driven in part by her planning, building, and writing for several public commissions and memorials. Everything That’s Alive Moves, featuring five large sculptures, offers a close encounter with the emotional impact of monuments and the political significance of memorials—how each evokes and speaks to citizenship; how both reflect belief in spaces of gathering; and how they alternately can speak in defense of or with suspicion toward a public, collective voice. This exhibition, coming on the heels of Olivier’s return from a year’s study in Rome investigating its ruins and public works, offers a chance to attune to her care for the minute and overlooked. Her gestures and materials may multiply in overwhelming quantities, but they are never larger-than-life. Through the accumulation and displacement of objects and materials, she reminds us that civic space accrues through the weight of peoples, and citizenship is built of absences.
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