The Global Arts Initiative at the University of Delaware invites artists to be “embedded” in one of the academic department at the school. I was invited to the residency as part of the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment (Lewes, DE), which was approximately an hour away from the main campus (Newark, DE). I was provided with a beautiful office space and a laboratory that was not in use. Seeing the maps and other miscellany of documents and stationery that was left in the office and the lab that I was using, I made two works—performance scores—one for each campus. Each score is meant to be placed within an office in disuse.
The works exist as two word documents. They could be printed out and framed in any way that the university sees fit or they could also be interpreted by anyone else who is interested.
This work was later reinterpreted upon an invitation to partake in an exhibition that represented the artist-driven space 5533 in Istanbul. 5533 is a storefront surrounded by empty shops, so I approached this context similarly and produced a score for the space, which was then exhibited in New York when the initiative 5533 was in residency there as a poster.
merve ünsal 