PANKABESTIA: Punk Beasts of the Swimming Cities of Serenissima
Anonymous Gallery @ Collective Hardware
169 Bowery (off Delancey), New York
November 20, 2009 - January 1, 2010
curated by Spy Emerson

“Pankabestia: Punk Beasts of the Swimming Cities of Serenissima” is an exhibition about the crew members, the individual artists that supported Swoon’s “Swimming Cities” projects, and it is about my own personal experience as a crew member of the “Swimming Cities of the Switchback Sea” and the “Swimming Cities of Serenissima.”

Both daunting projects were based on Swoon’s giant multimedia floating sculptures, beautiful rafts built from trash. As a group, we made these great, impossible situations happen.

A frequent critique of the Venice Biennale is its organization into national pavilions. As a legacy of the first Biennale of 1895, when nations were young, naive, and given to a prideful beating of their imperial wings, the idea of identifying particular art with a particular country and then competing for the best of show, a Golden Lion, might have once seemed appropriate. It now seems wholly anachronistic. In our current climate of globalization, of multi-national corporations and commissions funding large exhibitions in far flung territories, of curators and artists hopping from one project and one continent to another, segregation according to nationality appears somewhat fusty and quaint.