Liv Strand: Dear swarm I, a room swarming of we-me-s

Negotiations of bodies and space through paper and text: Curatorial Program for Research opens the new space CPR2 in Brooklyn and has invited the Swedish artist Liv Strand to create an installation that explores paper as a carrier of meaning. The work challenges modes of reading and makes it a spatial task that encourages and choreographs the gaze of visitors to bend and jump paperedges and to combine lines of texts across the space.

Paper carries meaning both literally in the sense that it has been a vessel for text messages for centuries and symbolically linking various aspects of culture. It is essential in sectors such as literature, transport, communication, construction, hygiene and art. The artist Liv Strand creates installations using paper also highlighting its material qualities - its ability to create sound (she sometimes uses it as a musical instrument), negotiate space and transfer light.

Dear swarm I, a room swarming of we-me-s is a body of work adaptable for the space where it is displayed. For CPR2 Liv Strand has created an installation with paper sheets of various sizes with her written texts as hand-made prints. The words concern becomings and how the individual relates to and negotiates with other bodies, objects and notions. To read them one must let one’s gaze travel through the space and connect sentences in a performative reading act; interlacing all parties sharing the space in a given moment.

CPR2: This celebratory occasion marks a new moment in the development of the Curatorial Program for Research (CPR). Having worked out of Brooklyn, NYC, since 2015, creating elaborate exchange and research programs for curators in various cities and regions throughout the world, CPR will now have a permanent presence on Lorimer Street. The space will work as a small residency program, gallery, occasional office and event location bringing the local audience and international artists together. The inaugural year has a strong focus on artists from the Swedish and Nordic art scene and is curated by Stockholm-based curator and CPR:s European Director Susanne Ewerlöf together with guest curators from CPR:s vast network.

Liv Strand is an artist engaged in thin materials such as paper, stick, sounds and veneer. She studies how the visuality of surfaces is interpreted and understood in social, rather than individual, negotiations. Her work addresses knowledge sharing and infrastructures which affect the comprehension in an episodic social body. Her works of art, formed as installations or performances, are directed to remind about the process of grasping something, momentarily. Strand holds a BFA from Trondheim Art Academy and an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art. She has exhibited and performed work in institutions such as Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen; Haus am Waldsee, Berlin; Depot, Istanbul; Norrköping Art Museum, Sweden and Konsthall C and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. In 2019 she performed the site specific work “A Walk in the Park” outside the Queens Museum in NYC curated by the Curatorial Program for Research.

Opening and inauguration program:
Thursday, April 7 at 5–8pm. Refreshments will be served.

6pm: Carmen Ferreyra, Founding Director of CPR gives an inaugural speech followed by a conversation between the artist Liv Strand and Susanne Ewerlöf, curator and European Director, CPR.

The exhibition has been made possible through generous support by The Swedish Arts Grant Committee – IASPIS and The Swedish Arts Council.