Pope.L: My Kingdom for a Title

Pope.L: My Kingdom for a Title 
Janurary 21 - May 16, 2021
Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago

“An exhibition is a favorite darkness.” —Pope.L

My Kingdom for a Title is the first exhibition to be organized at the Neubauer Collegium Gallery since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. The continuing global health emergency has unavoidably cast a shadow over the conception and development of this project; equally inevitably, it will also alter the viewer’s experience of the work, restricting access to the gallery in a manner that complicates the project’s allusion to the mirage of access as such. Visitors to the gallery will enter the space under the literal cloud of objects that have come to symbolize our current socio-medical predicament. The centerpiece of Pope.L’s immersive installation is an arrangement of works chosen from the artist’s Skin Set Project (ongoing since 1997). The resultant environment functions as a poignant meditation on the tangle of access, “color,” and well-being, conjured in the artist’s signature register of “enigmaticalness” – the fount of so much that continues to be great in these trying times for art.

My Kingdom for a Title is the most recent chapter in an evolving dialogue, now in its sixth year, between Neubauer Collegium Curator Dieter Roelstraete and Pope.L, a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. The exhibition will be accompanied by an essay recasting Hubert Damisch’s A Theory of /Cloud/ in the raking light of the Airborne Droplet/George Floyd era.

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete
 

One week after My Kingdom for a Title “opened,” while the gallery was still closed to the public, Pope.L returned to stage an intervention. In the video he produced with Robert Heishman, shown here, the exhibition serves as a backdrop for an elliptical event that emphasizes the “steal” in stealth.