Trade Show

Chloë Bass & Bill Dietz
Trade Show
November 16, 2019–January 12, 2020
Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven

For Trade Show, Bill Dietz and I staged a series of exchanges between the Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven’s public collection of artworks, and various non-art sites throughout the city (e.g., a factory, a private home, a restaurant). For the duration of the exhibition, the museum hosted non-art objects sourced from these sites. In turn, the sites from which objects are sourced hosted artworks from the City of Wilhelmshaven’s Art Collection (including works by Marcel Broodthaers, Christo, Marcel Duchamp, Richard Hamilton, Kasper König, Meret Oppenheim, and Günther Uecker). Woven into a contextualizing and complicating framework of texts, images, and sounds, we highlighted the dissonances of displacement. What happens when divergent paradigms of value and exchange intersect within disparate institutional spaces? Could it be that all forms of value and exchange are bound by haunting?

Trade Show was my first collaborative solo museum exhibition in the E.U. The exhibition featured photographic and text-based artworks documenting our exchanges, a looping audio work, and a collectible Finding Aid/exhibition guide. A catalogue is forthcoming from Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven. The exhibition was curated by Petra Stegmann.