Foreclosed:
Between Crisis and Possibility

The term foreclosure today is associated with the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. Caught in a cycle of crisis provoked by this collapse, the instinctive reaction is to search for solutions within the very institutional logic that produced the problem.

Foreclosed: Between Crisis and Possibility examines these responses by beginning with a reexamination of the term itself and locating this investigation within a global context. While foreclosure may refer to an eviction from a home, it also refers to a rejection of particular experiences, memories, and narratives. Within psychoanalysis, foreclosure evokes processes of exclusion and a shutting down of recognition. This exhibition is situated in the nexus between these two meanings. Cutting across the spatial and the psychic, it explores artistic practices and discursive strategies that investigate the multifold ways in which everyday experiences of displacement, threat, repression, and loss are embedded within specific social, cultural, and economic contexts. Through diverse techniques, the artists in this exhibition engage this politically paralyzing rhetoric of crisis by positing and negotiating alternative possibilities.

The exhibition employs a multilayered curatorial approach integrating the gallery space with a series of public platforms. These discussions, performances, and film screenings interrogate different interpretations of the term foreclosure, from the systemic to the subjective. Together, these platforms propose a critical reevaluation of the complex field that the term foreclosure demands. Participants include Benjamin Buchloh, Harriet Fraad, Ingrid Gould Ellen, David Harvey, Peter Marcuse, Damon Rich, Maggie Russell-Ciardi, and Radhika Subramaniam.

The exhibition features works by Kamal Aljafari, Yto Barrada, Tania Bruguera, Claude Closky, Harun Farocki, Allan Sekula, and David Shrigley.

Curated by Jennifer Burris, Sofía Olascoaga, Sadia Shirazi, and Gaia Tedone,
Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellows of the Whitney Independent Study Program, 2010–2011