Ramp Project: Beyond Kiosk
A Selection of the Kiosk Archive

January 18 - March 30, 2008

Over six hundred independent publication projects turn the transitional space of ICA’s ramp into a volume of volumes. Periodicals, zines, video and audio projects band the walls on narrow shelves skied high on the walls. “Beyond Kiosk” encourages viewers to pull material and peruse it along the way— picture the book stalls of Paris—or stop and read in the window seat and lounge staged half-way up the ramp. This is the 14th commission in ICA’s Ramp Project Series and will be on view January 18-March 30, 2008.

Selected by Christoph Keller, in an installation designed by Conny Purtill, the exhibition takes an exemplary swath from the Kiosk archive which Keller founded in 2001, housed in Germany’s state library, the Kunstbibliothek, Berlin. Totaling over five thousand publication projects, the archive has traveled and been exhibited in its ever-increasing entirety at venues across Europe and America with an artist or designer typically involved in the installation. “Beyond Kiosk” realizes for the first time a curated view of the archive, one that represents both the mass and diversity of the overall collection.  A local component will take its place when Keller selects material from Philadelphia’s strong community of independent publishers.

“Beyond Kiosk” represents a super-fluorescence of independent publishing projects. It corresponds with computer technologies and means of distribution that make publishing affordable and accessible to virtually anyone who wants to put their ideas into print. More significantly, it explores the range of strategies and modes of production deployed within this increasingly effective means of distribution for making ideas visible. 

Christoph Keller is a publisher, designer, curator and distiller, formerly the founding director of the publishing house Revolver-Archiv für aktuelle kunst, based in Frankfurt. He is now editing “Christoph Keller Editions,” a series of artists’ books published by JRP/Ringier, Zurich. Conny Purtill is the principle of the Philadelphia-based design firm Purtill Family Business.  His design for the publication series Matthew Ritchie: Incomplete Projects 01-07 won the category of graphics in I.D. Magazine’s 53rd Annual Design Awards for 2007. He has worked closely and extensively with ICA over the years.

View a time-lapse video of the installation (requires Flash player).

Installation footage and editing by Emilie Froh, William Hidalgo and Johanna Plummer.

Installation views at ICA. Photos by Aaron Igler. > click to enlarge





This exhibition is organized by Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner and will be accompanied by a brochure publication with a conversation between Christoph Keller and Conny Purtill.

THE RAMP PROJECT SERIES

Every season ICA commissions an artist to create a new site-specific temporary work for the ramp that links the first and second floor galleries. A transitional space, the ramp is 52-feet long and is visible from the street through architecturally-scaled picture windows on the building’s façade.

Especially when it is illuminated at night, each of the commissioned works transforms the ramp into a window on ICA’s innovative program on contemporary art. Since the series began in 2000, the ramp has been a site for a diverse range of creative approaches, including wall paintings by Ingrid Calame, Arturo Herrera and Amy Sillman; environmetal installations by Virgil Marti, Judy Pfaff and Luca

Buvoli; a light and sound piece by Nadine Robinson; an ongoing conceptual project by Alexandra Mir; street photography by Zoe Strauss, and, most recently, a terrarium/aquarium by Phoebe Washburn.

ICA acknowledges primary sponsorship of the William Penn Foundation for this project. Additional funding has been provided by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The Dietrich Foundation, Inc., the Overseers Board for the Institute of Contemporary Art, friends and members of ICA, and the University of Pennsylvania. (Information complete as of 12/14/07.)

Image: Kiosk (VI) Manifesta 4, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt/Main (May 24-  August 25, 2002), Installation: Stefan Wieland & Christoph Keller. Photo: Baumann


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