Announcement: Broadcast opening reception, Thursday, February 19, 6-8pm at Pratt Manhattan Gallery

Please join us at Pratt Manhattan Gallery for the opening of
Broadcast, guest curated by Irene Hofmann, on Thursday, February 19,
6-8pm

"Broadcast"
February 20 - May 2, 2009
Pratt Manhattan Gallery
144 West 14th Street, 2nd floor
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11am-6pm
Opening Reception: 6-8pm Thursday, February 19

For more information please visit www.pratt.edu/exhibitions

Pratt Manhattan Gallery will present "Broadcast," an exhibition of
thirteen works by an international group of artists who, since the 1960s,
have engaged, critiqued, and inserted themselves into official channels
of broadcast television and radio. The exhibition will run from February
20 - May 2, 2009 and will include single-channel monitor-based videos,
video-projection works, photography, installations, and interactive
broadcasting projects.

"Broadcast" is a traveling exhibition co-organized by the Contemporary
Museum, Baltimore, and iCI (Independent Curators International), New
York; circulated by iCI; and guest-curated by Irene Hofmann. The
exhibition comes to Pratt Manhattan Gallery from Museum of Contemporary
Art, Detroit, and Contemporary Museum, Baltimore. The exhibition and tour
are made possible, in part, with support from the iCI Exhibition
Partners.

Work in the exhibition dates from the late 1960s and 1970s, when artists
began to broadcast on their own, seeking a parallel system to commercial
broadcast television, and when others began to cooperate with progressive
public television stations that invited artists to participate in
residency programs.

"With works that directly engage, challenge, or subvert the structure and
authority of broadcast media, the artists in this exhibition post
provocative questions about the impact that radio and television can have
in shaping the events of our time," said guest curator Hofmann. "At a
time when YouTube invites us all to "Broadcast Yourself," the works in
the exhibition remind us that, even with such democratizing new broadcast
outlets, the power and control of our traditional media outlets is still
held only by a few powerful entities."

The artists in this exhibition work in one of two ways-by creating or
inserting themselves in original broadcasts or by appropriating existing
ones. Within each of these strategies, there are two impulses followed by
the artists-either an iconoclastic, aggressive position, at times
intended to question Federal Communications Commission regulations, or a
more cooperative and collaborative position.

Examples of broadcasting in the exhibition will include Top Value
Television's (TVTV) Four More Years, a subversive view of the American
electoral process featuring irreverent coverage of Richard Nixon's 1972
presidential campaign and the Republican National Convention; and Chris
Burden's TV Hijack, where the artist took a television interviewer
hostage on live television to illustrate the control television has on
our lives.

Examples of work that appropriates and re-interprets broadcasts in the
exhibition will include video and installation artist Dara Birnbaum's
Hostage, which features archival media coverage from the 1977 kidnapping
of the German industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer by the Baader-Meinhof
group; and multi-media installation artist Antoni Muntadas' The Last Ten
Minutes, which studies broadcasting conventions in different times in
history.

Other works from the exhibition include conceptual artist Christian
Jankowski's Telemistica, which features footage from live broadcast
footage of psychics on Venetian television stations answering questions
from the artist on how his work would be received at the 1999 Venice
Biennale; and media and sound performance group neuroTransmitter's 12
Miles Out, a visual and sound installation that explores the practice of
offshore pirate radio in 1960s and 1970s Europe.

The exhibition also features work by artist and renegade broadcaster
Gregory Green; performance and video artists Doug Hall, Chip Lord, and
Jody Procter; sculptor and video artist Iigo Manglano-Ovalle;
photographer, videographer, and installation artist Antoni Muntadas;
pioneering video artist Nam June Paik; and computer-driven video
installation artist Siebren Versteeg.

Guest-curator Irene Hofmann is Executive Director of the Contemporary
Museum in Baltimore. Recent exhibitions include "Cell Phone: Art and the
Mobile Phone" and "St. Cecilia," a solo exhibition of works by Joseph
Grigely. Hofmann previously served as Curator of Contemporary Art at the
Orange County Museum of Art, where she co-curated the 2002 and 2004
California Biennials and the photography and video exhibition "Girls'
Night Out." She has organized exhibitions and projects with artists such
as Kutlug Ataman, Mark Dion, Jason Dodge, Fabrice Gygi, Iigo
Manglano-Ovalle, and Marjetica Potrc.

The exhibition is the last of the "Politics and Media" series at Pratt
Manhattan Gallery. The first, "Party Headquarters: Voting is Just the
Beginning," an exhibition of political art works guest-curated by Eleanor
Heartney and Larry Litt, took place from September 25 - November 4, 2008;
the second, "Zones of Conflict," took place November 19, 2008 - February
7, 2009, and was guest-curated by T.J. Demos, presented images of current
struggles and blurred the distinction between document and artistic
practice.

A cell phone audio tour led by the curator featuring commentary from five
of the artists in the exhibition will be available on site.

An artist/curator talk will take place on April 1 at 6:30pm. A separate
announcement will follow in March.

More information on the exhibition and talk can be found at
www.pratt.edu/exhibitions

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