Hemispheric Institute, Staging Citizenship, National University, Bogotá, Colombia
The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and the National University of Colombia invite artists, performers, academics and activists to propose performances, papers, performance-based scholarship, videos, installations, visual art exhibits, activist projects, hacktivist or virtual actions, work group projects and other forms that bring together performance and politics in the Americas.
Fallen Fruit will exhibit public fruit maps: INAUGURACION EXHIBICION DE ARTES VISUALES – Permanentes durante todo el Encuentro

Los Angeles, CA – Fallen Fruit, an artist’s collective which has been working for over five years in Southern California, is issuing a national call for “Public Fruit Jams.” This is an event in which groups of people gather their home-grown, self-picked or public fruit (found growing on or over public space) and meet together in “public jams.”

The Public Fruit Jam is a collaborative event started by Fallen Fruit four years ago and subsequently held in several California cities such as San Diego, San Francisco and Santa Monica, as well as in Linz, Austria, as part of an international art exhibition. At these events hundreds of jars of tremendous variety are created. Participants work without specific recipes, using precise proportions to create all kinds of new and experimental jams, such as guava basil jam and strawberry grapefruit marmalade.

The purpose of the Public Fruit Jam is to bring people together in a sort of public harvest festival, to celebrate both the harvest and the community itself. Small groups will sit together and negotiate the jam,. For example, if one brings lemons and the other figs, the jam might be lemon fig with lavender. Participants are encouraged to trade jams and leave jars for others, so no one leaves empty handed.

dowload pdf herePUBLIC_FRUIT_JAM_instructions_web

Come join us for the 4th Annual Fallen Fruit Public Fruit Jam at Machine Project and an “After Jam” closing party at Another Year in LA to celebrate the closing of Fresh ‘n Easy.

Fallen Fruit will be in a residency the Headlands Center for the Arts through the month of July. Join us on July 12 for an open house and July 23rd for an artist talk, Is This What Democracy Looks Like?”

www.headlands.org

Come to our second solo show, and second opening this month at Another Year in LA. Fresh ‘n Easy will feature select photographic works, including a series of portraits of teenagers from around the world eating a variety of fruit (a metaphor for their transition or “ripening” into adulthood), a special edition of etched glass Public Fruit Jam jars, and an edition of Neighborhood Infusions (vodka infused with the fruit from one neighborhood or block in an attempt to capture “the spirit of the place”). In addition, Fallen Fruit is introducing Everyday Objects, a limited edition collection of cutting boards, pencils, wooden spoons, gingham tablecloths and knives similar to those used during their Public Fruit Jam emblazoned with Youtube video responses they received, such as: “dipshit liberals, always looking for a handout.”

Opening Reception: Saturday, June 20, 7pm – 10pm

Closing Reception: Saturday, August 3, 6pm – 9pm

another year in LA
2121 N. San Fernando Road
Los Angeles, CA 90065
Gallery hours are Tuesday – Friday, 12pm – 5pm,
and Saturday, 1pm – 4pm
www.anotheryearinla.com

Fallen Fruit has its first solo show opening this month at LACE, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. United Fruit premieres a new body of work inspired by an exploration of the banana during the trio’s recent residency in Columbia, South America.   The work unpeels the social, political, and pop history of the banana from a goldmine of global capitalism to the popular media manipulation comic and erotic symbol of the banana. The opening is on June 16 at 7pm – it’s a special participatory performance called Are You Happy To See Me? Hundreds of bananas will be offered to guests to eat, AND we invite you to photograph yourself playing with this often comical or suggestive fruit.  The show runs from June 16 to September 27.

Fallen Fruit, Banana Workers (2009)
FALLEN FRUIT: UNITED FRUIT
Drawn from Fallen Fruit’s recent trip to Columbia, David Burns, Matias Viegener
and Austin Young examine the social, political and pop history of the banana.

Exhibition runs 17 June – 27 September 2009

Opening reception 16 June 16 2009, 8pm – 10pm
featuring the participatory performance Are You Happy To See Me?

LACE is proud to present United Fruit, the first solo show by the artists collective Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young), opening Tuesday June 16, 2009 and running through September 27, 2009. This exhibition premieres a new body of work generated during Fallen Fruit’s recent residency in Colombia, South America which features a series of photographs and video installations exploring the social, political and pop history of the banana.

The opening reception, on Tuesday June 16 from 8pm – 10pm, features Are You Happyto See Me?, a participatory performance involving hundreds of bananas available for eating. Attendees will be encouraged to photograph themselves playing with this often comical or suggestive fruit.

As the most popular fruit in the world, the banana is ubiquitous in daily life — both as a food staple in grocery stores large and small as well as the supremely seductive fruit used in modern advertising and branding. At the same time the banana’s history, politics and origins have remained virtually invisible due to the remoteness of where they are grown and of the people who grow them.

Fallen Fruit’s installation at LACE engages its subject in a range of bold and oblique strategies, signaling perhaps that no single history of the banana is possible. The title for the exhibition, United Fruit comes from the United Fruit Company which exists today in a much reduced form as Chiquita Bananas. More powerful than the Latin American countries it colonized, the corporation was marked by its ruthlessness and corruption, and its exploitation of workers, a turbulent history of protests and events that lead to the infamous Banana Massacre of 1928 near the town of Ciénega, Colombia, which Fallen Fruit visited to create this work. Burns, Viegener and Young chose to retain the title United Fruit for its hopeful and utopian echo, a contrast to its actual history.

The banana was first brought to Colombia over a hundred years ago by the United Fruit Company, which had a stranglehold on the global banana market, dominating all of North America and parts of Europe. They helped Latin American countries build railroads which were then utilized primarily for banana shipments, building a vast system of plantations which held workers in perpetual isolation. The economic model of the United Fruit Company became a template for a new kind of global monopoly capitalism. In the 1970s the company finally collapsed from a combination of political pressure, its own corruption, and changing economics.

The banana is a cultural symbol that has a powerful history of marketing and manipulation. In addition to its examination of the social and political history of the banana, United Fruit also examines the playful place of the banana in pop culture as the central prop in suggestive jokes and naughty humor. As much as there is a prohibition against stating the obvious, the force of the banana as a phallic symbol cannot be ignored.

Fallen Fruit, United Fruit (2009)

ARTOFFICE/s online project Moving Index (curated by Julie Orser & Victoria Fu)

The MOVING INDEX: 2008-2009, our new online exhibition project. Each program of this year-long series is a grouping of 3 hand-picked artists, whose films and videos will be viewable on artoffice.org for two months. The project functions as an intersection between gallery screenings and video-sharing websites–recalling artists’ use of public-access television in the 1980’s to reach large audiences. The MOVING INDEX is a way to have curated programs of film and video seen beyond the scope of our screenings

We have a new piece, Jam Score, at Seattle at the Lawrimore Project. Jam Score has two parts, a text-based “score” that conveys the actions and atmosphere of a public fruit jam, and a wall piece made with our jam. The Exhibition is called Scores and is curated by Volume (Robert Crouch and Ed Patuto). May 7 through June 13th.

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Fallen Fruit is a guest curator for the LACE Benefit Art Auction, May 20 − 21. Our grouping is called California Dreamin’ and it includes Lauren Bon, Kim Stringfellow, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest and the LA Urban Rangers. Support LACE!

www.welcometolace.org/events/view/lace-benefit-art-auction-2009/