Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s conception of the mimetic faculty—a powerful compulsion to become and behave like something else—Fionn Meade will examine the impulse to “act the other” in the work of a group of emerging, international artists, including Tris Vonna Michel, Emily Wardill, Patricia Esquivas, Pedro Paiva, Luke Fowler, Meiro Koizumi, and Sung Hwan Kim. These practitioners, Meade suggests, elaborate the conditions of alterity through strategies of estrangement that occur alongside an engagement with materiality, figuration, and performance. Their work often conflates post-modern appropriation with conventions of folk structures and oral traditions.
Fionn Meade’s writing has appeared in Artforum, Parkett, Bidoun, BOMB, and the Fillip Review. Recent curatorial projects include Degrees of Remove: Landscape & Affect, co-curated with Sarina Basta at Sculpture Center, Entr’acte at Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and Bivouac at Vox Populi. Additionally, he was the assistant curator for the exhibit Rachel Harrison: Consider the Lobster at Hessel Museum of Art and CCS Galleries at Bard College, where he also co-organized a concurrent exhibition, And Other Essays, featuring new projects by Nayland Blake, Tom Burr, Harry Dodge, Alix Lambert, Allan Ruppersberg, and Andrea Zittel.