Cauleen Smith: COVID MANIFESTO

We are proud to collaborate with CIRCA, the new and independently curated digital art platform, launching its second month of programming with Cauleen Smith. The inaugural c. 20:20 exhibition transforms the giant 4K screen of Piccadilly Lights into a digital canvas each month by pausing the adverts on screen for two minutes each day at 20:20 - 20:22 GMT. More info and watch live here: circa.art

Cauleen Smith's works compile her Instagram series, COVID MANIFESTO, which the interdisciplinary California artist initiated a couple of weeks after the United States went into lockdown. From the 13th April 2020 onwards, her hand-drawn COVID MANIFESTO points have followed both the quotidian reality of her practice in the studio and the strangeness of being out of the classroom during the academic year. Her frustrations, reflections and inspirations resonate with the eventful episodes of real life, namely, the turmoil and aftermaths of the central government management of the pandemic, the assassination of George Floyd, and the collective action claiming the end of police brutality across the globe.

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Cauleen will be rewriting and revealing each point of the Manifesto throughout the duration of November. In a sort of 'living' still life, the artist's desk will be the tableau, in which personal items, remnants of daily rituals, and key references to her practice will accumulate, appear and disappear. COVID MANIFESTO consists of 23 pronouncements. The project will unfold in a sequence, a crescendo, that will be punctuated by 7 intermissions selected from Smith’s existing works. Over the month, the personal and poetic, the eventful and now historical, will feature as Smith responds to Covid-19 and its multiple aftermaths.

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The CIRCA website will also be transformed into an extraordinary archive of past projects from the artist's trajectory, references from her ongoing research and allusions to her revolutionary imaginary, constituting a virtual mid-career survey. We welcome both local audiences standing in Piccadilly and global participant tuned in online to engage with both the scattered snippets of COVID MANIFESTO and the long form. By accessing web content persistently, you can generate conditions of possibility. The collaborative project is a call for a proposal of virtual proximity and distance, in which a series of new social relations to content and the meaning of place are entirely reshaped. It is a timely narrative providing insight into an individual’s intimate experience as shared through social media— a form of storytelling that holds a mirror up to society, one daily pronouncement at a time.

CIRCA's daily calendar is curated in collaboration by The Showroom Assistant Curator Katherine Finerty and CIRCA's Tony Tremlett – HERE