Drywall is Forever (again)

2024
The Swiss Institute, NY
Installation (Completed)

A restaging of our ‘Drywall is Forever’ installation at the Swiss Institute’s group exhibition ‘Energies.’

For Energies, an exhibition at the Swiss Institute, we were invited to reprise ‘Drywall is Forever,’ which we first installed for Performa in 2019. The project looks at waste in art exhibitions, focusing primarily on gypsum, the surface that defines the white cube, as a finite resource that we should consider closely. Gypsum is used to produce, over and over, the appearance of newness and novelty in spaces that are reconfigured every few months. For the installation, we collected pieces of drywall gathered from deinstalls at galleries and museums across the city to make this 12-foot wall, blank on one side and showing exhibition content on the other.

Energies gathered twenty artists to explore global issues related to energy through a context of local history. The show begins with its home in the East Village, and staged associated exhibitions at other nearby locations. By looking at local ecologies, political arrangements, and advocacy through the lens of energy the show helped demonstrate how global and even cosmic phenomena can enter the lives of individuals and communities. The wall itself became a sign and a connection to the material realities of the art world at large, highlighting how materials act even when they’re designed to disappear.

Project Team: Jaffer Kolb, Ivi Diamantopoulou, Rennie Jones

Selected Press

‘Energies’ and Beyond: Exploring the East Village via the Swiss Institute, World Architects, September 2024.
“Energies” Swiss Institute / New York, Flash Art International, December, 2024.