SARAH PIERCE

EPISODE 3: Third person - installation, screening and event. Since 2003, Sarah Pierce has used an umbrella term - 'The Metropolitan Complex' - to describe her art practice. Despite its institutional resonance, this title does not signify an organisation. Instead, it demonstrates Pierce's broad understanding of cultural work, articulated through various discursive working methods, involving papers, interviews, archives, talks and exhibitions. Her primary focus during If I Can't Dance..., has included a notion of 'being student' which Pierce develops "as a state of immediacy - the quality of being in direct and instant involvement with something that gives rise to a sense of urgency or excitement." The installation in Project’s Cube presents nine interviews with art students from the Dutch Art Institute in Enschede, all dealing with a historical relationship between performance and "presentness".

Set against a backdrop of letters, posters and scripts from Project's archives, circa 1970-80, Pierce's processes of interrogation forge a relationship between visibility and disappearance - elements that coalesce in the masquerade - and highlight the potential for dissent and self-determination within institutional organisation.

Episode 2: We won’t fade away, presentation. Since 2003, Sarah Pierce has used an umbrella term - 'The Metropolitan Complex' - to describe her art practice. Despite its institutional resonance, this title does not signify an organisation. Instead, it demonstrates Pierce's broad understanding of cultural work, articulated through various discursive working methods, involving papers, interviews, archives, talks and exhibitions.

EPISODE 1, EXHIBITION: It's time man. It feels imminent, 2008 - installation with video, audio, diaprojections, colored sheets and presentation furniture. Several pieces from the archive of de Appel. [Courtesy de Appel and the artist]. In the ongoing project, 'It’s time man. It feels imminent', Sarah Pierce interrogates the emptying-out of the political gesture and the way in which we negotiate agency in public space. The installation at de Appel expands this research to think about how people organize (their political and social commitment) around and through institutions.