Jovana Stokic speaks with artist Lucy Skaer
Thursday, February 4, 2010
7 pm

Curator of Location One’s Abramović Studio, Jovana Stokić will speak with artist Lucy Skaer about her current and past work, focusing on the collaborative artist group Henry VIII’s Wives, who have been working together since 1998, mainly in film and video. The talk is free and open to the public. Skaer was recently shortlisted for the prestigious Turner Prize and is currently an International Fellow in Location One’s Residency Program.

A collective was formed in 1997 in Glasgow with the intention of experimenting around collaborative art projects. Its first exhibition was named “Henry VIII’s Wives” and its very title implied their ideology signifying, according to them “a surviving curiosity, a physical impossibility, or just a collection of people who should have known better.” Henry VIII’s Wives’ practice points to the obsolescence of traditionally interpreted ideologies by gently mocking collective spirit: their initial motto was: “We March Under the Banner of Visual Art.” They developed performative projects in which they involved local communities not limited to ordinary gallery-going audience. Tonight’s discussion will focus on issues of non-hierarchical collaboration, dissemination of artworks both within and outside of gallery system and age-old question regarding utopian aspect of art practice. For the first time in New York, several of Henry VIII or I’s Wives’ films will be shown.
for more info >> www.h8w.net and www.tatlinstowerandtheworld.net

Lucy Skaer was born in Cambridge and studied at the Glasgow School of Art. Much of her work consists of her interacting with, and changing, public spaces. In one piece, she took up a paving stone on Glasgow’s Buchanan Street and then had the Earl of Glasgow ceremoniously lay down a replacement, while in an Amsterdam-based piece, she left a diamond and a scorpion side-by-side on a pavement. She has also secretly hidden moth and butterfly pupae in criminal courts in the hope that they will hatch in mid-trial. Skaer has also exhibited drawings and is a member of the Henry VIII’s Wives collective of artists. In 2003, Skaer was shortlisted for the Beck’s Futures prize. She currently lives and works in Glasgow.

In 2008 Skaer was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland which included newly commissioned work. There was a comprehensive monograph published to accompany the show. Her most recent major solo exhibition is ‘A Boat Used As A Vessel’, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland (April 2009 – June 2009).

Lucy Skaer is represented by doggerfisher, Edinburgh (www.doggerfisher.com). In April 2009, she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize.

Belgrade-born, New York-based art historian and critic Jovana Stokić holds a Ph.D from the Institute of Fine Arts at the New York
University. Her dissertation, titled “The Body Beautiful: Feminine Self-Representations 1970 – 2007,” analyzes works of several women artists – Marina Abramovic, Martha Rosler, Joan Jonas — since the 1970s, particularly focusing on the notions of
self-representation and beauty. Jovana has been writing art criticism for several years, and has curated several thematic exhibitions and performance events in the US, Italy, Spain and Serbia. Jovana was a fellow at the New Museum of Contemporary
Art, New York, a researcher at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the curator of the Kimmel Center Galleries, New York University. She has most recently written an essay for Marina Abramović’s MoMA exhibition catalogue.