The Whispering Campaign

Previous Mellon Collaborative Fellowship

Curator Dieter Roelstraete and artist Pope.L (University of Chicago, Department of Visual Arts) expand upon their collaboration at documenta 14 where Pope.L first presented his Whispering Campaign project (Roelstraete was a documenta 14 curator). Continuing to evolve as a Gray Center Mellon Collaborative Fellowship, Whispering Campaign has also included sponsored tours and conversations at documenta 14 with University of Chicago staff, students and faculty, the exhibtion Brown People are the Wrens of the Parking Lot at Logan Center Gallery, and a co-taught course for Winter Quarter 2018 entitled Art and Knowledge.

Portable Gray interview with Pope.L and Dieter Roelstraete HERE.

Course

Art and Knowledge
Department of Visual Arts
ARTV 27214, 37214
Professor Pope.L and Dieter Roelstraete

This course is an exploration of questions concerning the relationship between Art and knowledge. Is Art knowledge? Can Art create knowledge? If Art is neither knowledge nor creates knowledge, what is its function? These questions are discussed using themes: secrecy, rumor, ignorance and surveillance, and a corresponding set of artworks by a group of artists who utilize these approaches: Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Sophie Calle and Julia Scher, among others. We will also do close readings of essays relating to our themes, for example: texts on recent theories of ignorance as knowledge or Derrida’s metaphysics of presence. To round out our discussions, students will participate in a series of hands-on art exercises to give our analyses more material form and further ‎exemplify our exploration.

EXHIBITION

Mellon Collaborative Fellows, artist and UChicago Professor Pope.L, and curator Dieter Roelstraete worked together on The Whispering Campaign that began with Documenta 14 and continued with an exhibition at the Logan Center Gallery, Brown People Are The Wrens In The Parking Lot (curated by Yesomi Umolu). Throughout their work together there emerged urgent questions that relate to the various immigration issues taking place here in the US and in Europe, as well as the basic problem of knowing a stranger and cutting deeper into the fundamental subject of ignorance and knowledge.

BOOK

Edited by Dieter Roelstraete, Pope.L: Campaign is a three-part report on the long-term collaboration between artist Pope.L and curator Dieter Roelstraete which revolves around issues of connectedness, home, and migration, while addressing art’s relationship to knowledge. Begun in spring 2016 with an invitation, extended to the artist by Roelstraete and his colleagues Monika Szewczyk and Adam Szymczyk, to participate in the fourteenth edition of documenta, Pope.L’s contribution took on the guise of an immersive, seemingly omnipresent sound installation titled Whispering Campaign, consisting of thousands of hours of whispered content—addressing nationhood and borders—broadcast throughout Athens and Kassel using both speakers and live “whisperers.”
A mere month after the closing of documenta 14 in Kassel, a second chapter of the titular campaign was inaugurated at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts, revolving centrally around the exhibition and art intervention project Brown People Are the Wrens in the Parking Lot, curated by Yesomi Umolu—a complex, multifaceted enterprise that involved a more or less conventional art exhibit, a DIY media campaign, a thematic library, video interviews, and a series of events ranging from impromptu performances and DJ sets to an expansive program of talks, presentations, and debates. This campaign-cum-exhibition took place at a significant moment in US history dominated by debates over immigration, race, and the plight of the 99 percent—dominated, in a sense, by constant campaigning.
The third and final chapter of the artist’s campaign unfolded as a course co-taught at the University of Chicago by Pope.L and Roelstraete titled Art and Knowledge, which, in part at least, sought to address one of Whispering Campaign’s catchiest and most puzzling slogans—namely, “ignorance is a virtue.” The students who constituted this query’s primary audience were invited to contribute their observations and intuitions concerning art’s at times proudly tenuous relationship to knowledge, prompting all of us wonder whether “art and knowledge” should really be read as “art or knowledge.”

Edited by Dieter Roelstraete

Texts by Zachary Cahill, Klea Charitou, Iris Colburn, Tianyu Guo, Jeffrey Hsu, Leon Hösl, Vidura Jang Bahadur, Michal Koszycki, Chichan Kwong, Cristen Leifheit, Jasmin Liang, Brock Lownes, Elizabeth McClafferty, Adrienne Elyse Meyers, Pope.L, Monika Szewczyk, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt.

Fellows

Photo of the Artist_Credit Peyton Fulford_0

Pope.L (1955-2023)

Pope.L was a visual artist and educator whose multidisciplinary practice uses binaries, contraries and preconceived notions embedded within contemporary culture to create art works in various formats, for example, writing, painting, performance, installation, video and sculpture. Building upon his long history of enacting arduous, provocative, absurdist performances and interventions in public spaces, Pope.L applied some of the same social, formal and performative strategies to his interests in language, system, gender, race and community. The goals for his work are several: joy, money and uncertainty— not necessarily in that order.

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DIETER ROELSTRAETE

Dieter Roelstraete is Curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago. Prior to this appointment, he was as a member of the curatorial team for Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel in 2017.
From 2012 until 2015 he was the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where he organized Goshka Macuga: Exhibit, A (2012); The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology (2013); Simon Starling: Metamorphology (2014); The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music 1965 to Now(2015, co-curated with Naomi Beckwith); and Kerry James Marshall: Mastry(2016, co-curated with Ian Alteveer and Helen Molesworth).
From 2003 until 2011 he was a curator at the Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art (MuHKA), where he organized large-scale group exhibitions as well as monographic shows, including Emotion Pictures (2005); Intertidal, a survey show of contemporary art from Vancouver (2005); The Order of Things (2008); Liam Gillick and Lawrence Weiner—A Syntax of Dependency (2011); A Rua: The Spirit of Rio de Janeiro (2011); Chantal Akerman: Too Close, Too Far (2012) and the collaborative projects Academy: Learning from Art (2006), and Kerry James Marshall: Paintings and Other Stuff (2013).
A former editor of Afterall and cofounder of the journal FR David, Roelstraete has published extensively on contemporary art and related philosophical issues in numerous catalogues and journals including Artforum, Art Review, e-flux journal, frieze, Metropolis M,Mousse Magazine, Parkett, and Texte zur Kunst.