Empty Office invites collectors of local art to deposit pieces from their private collections into the Joburg Art Bin at the Bag Factory for “creative recycling” between the 18th of July and the 1st of August 2008.
A team of artists, in consultation with the collector depositing the work, will dismantle the work and use the physical detritus to develop proposals for public artworks to be installed in
The central idea behind the project is to invite collectors to democratize their art collections by donating pieces of it to the public realm. Empty Office argues that because of the increasing commercialization of the visual arts, cultural production is essentially becoming privatized and controlled by capital. The project is radical in the sense that it asks collectors to depart with work they may treasure in order to invest in the idea of art rather than material instances of it. There are many reasons why an art collector may feel motivated to donate work to the Joburg Art Bin: they may feel that a piece is obsolescent, reached its sell-by date, that it is ideologically problematic, that it has potential to be shared with a broader community, or a collector may just be curious about what happens to piece of art that they own is dismantled by another visual artist.
We are interested in how art objects are remotivated in new contexts, specifically in how the lives of objects change as they move from the private into the public domain. In this sense, the project is neither nihilistic nor anti-aesthetic but rather celebrates the contribution that artists make to culture, by asking artists to materially intervene directly on the artworks that collectors have donated to the Joburg Art Bin.
Participate in maintaining the dynamism of contemporary culture by depositing a piece from your private collection at the Bag Factory at our opening event at 17h30,
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