PROJECTS
Guest Work Agency initiates and collaborates on exhibitions, talks and texts at the intersection of art, curating, technology and the law. A selection of our past and ongoing projects are viewable below.
LEGAL LAB
SERPENTINE GALLERIES R&D PLATFORM - arts technologies
2019 - ONGOING
As part of the Serpentine’s R&D Platform, the Legal Lab explores how the law can better support collaborations across art, science and technology. Led by Founder and Director of Guest Work Agency, Alana Kushnir, it is a space for investigating legal issues and prototyping accessible legal solutions for the art field.
Legal structures and tools, such as contracts, are crucial to structuring innovative enterprises and effective operational models. However, in the sphere of art, there is a tendency to shy away from legally onerous forms of arrangement. This has resulted in legal infrastructures being under-acknowledged for their multifaceted potential in supporting cutting-edge creative practice. These concerns are present in the internal organisation of the art field and the expanding realm of cross-disciplinary relationships between art actors and external fields.
LEGAL LAB LIVE SERIES
Legal Lab Live is a series of conversations on law and the metaverse presented on Twitch throughout 2022 - 23.
Forging Creative Agency in the Metaverse
In the first of the Serpentine Legal Lab Live series, Guest Work Agency Director and Serpentine Legal Lab’s Principal Investigator, Alana Kushnir, joined Serpentine’s Arts Technologies R&D Strategic Lead, Victoria Ivanova, in a Twitch livestream delving into the legal rights and responsibilities assist artists and cultural organisations in forging their agency within the metaverse
Watch the first Legal Lab Live session.
Indigenous Sovereignty in the Metaverse
In the second instalment of the Serpentine Legal Lab Live series, Alana Kushnir and Australian First Nations Cultural Broker and Author Vanessa Lee-Ah Mat explore Indigenous agency and data sovereignty in the metaverse, and the relevance of ICIP.
Watch the second Legal Lab Live session.
Evolutions in Web3 Licensing
In the third and final instalment of the Serpentine Legal Lab Live series, Alana Kushnir and legal scholar, internet activist and artist Primavera de Filippi explored the legal and technical issues surrounding the licensing of NFTs.
Watch the third Legal Lab Live session.
COALA Global NFT Licensing Taskforce
The Legal Lab participates in the NFT Licensing Taskforce, organised by COALA Global, an effort to develop semi-public licenses for NFTs. Led by legal scholar and artist Primavera De Filippi, the task force is aimed at creating a new set of licenses with modular terms and conditions—à la Creative Commons – as well as the technical implementation of linking a licence to an NFT.
RELATIVE PERMANENCE
AÉSOP, SYDNEY PITT ST
SEPTEMBER 2019 - MARCH 2020
Installation view, Spring, from the Relative Permanence exhibition series, Aesop Sydney, 2019/2020. Image credit: Jessica Maurer. Artwork credit: Sarah Meyohas, Cloud of Petals, 2018. Courtesy of Guest Work Agency.
Relative Permanence is a series of digital art exhibitions curated by Guest Work Agency for Aésop’s largest store to date, which is located in Sydney’s Pitt St and designed by Snohetta. The store features a dedicated space for creative projects, including an internal amphitheatre and screen. The series of digital art exhibitions will evolve seasonally, beginning in Spring 2019 and ending in Winter 2020. Each exhibition draws on a virtue associated with a key developmental stage of life—from hope in Spring to purpose in Summer, love in Autumn and wisdom in Winter.
The Autumn exhibition is curated in collaboration with the 22nd Biennale of Sydney and Artistic Director Brook Andrew.
Participating artists include Harm van den Dorpel, Sarah Meyohas, Jenna Sutela, Ahmed Hamdi, Reko Rennie, Suzanne Kim, James Taylor and Maora Brasil and Ana Beatriz Domingues.
The Empire Remains Shop
Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe)
Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) is a London-based duo of spatial practitioners. They explore the systems that organize the world through food. Using installation, performance, and mapping, their research-based practice operates within the overlap among visual arts, architecture, and geopolitics. They have been part of the US Pavilion, 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale; residents of The Politics of Food program at Delfina Foundation; and have shown their work at venues including the Victoria and Albert Museum, dOCUMENTA(13), the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, and the Centre for Contemporary Architecture in Montreal.
Based on a public installation in London in the fall of 2016, the book catalogues and develops the installation's critical program of discussions, performances, dinners, installations, and screenings hosted at 91–93 Baker Street. Structured as a franchise agreement, The Empire Remains Shop lays out some of the landscapes, imaginaries, economies, and aesthetics that future iterations of the shop would need to address in order to think through political counterstructures for a better distributed, hyper-globalized world.
Collection+: Christian Thompson
Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation
Sydney 23 October – 12 December 2015
Collection+: Christian Thompson, is the fifth iteration of the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) Collection+ series. The series is conceived as a hybrid project with a specific cross-pollinating purpose. Some 800 works in The Gene & Brian Sherman Collection are scrutinised and assessed by invited curators working in partnership with SCAF’s curatorial team. Each curator selects a single artist from the collection and researches collections nationally and internationally in order to identify significant related works by the same artist.
Collection+: Christian Thompson explores what it truly means to own or possess something, the extinction and rediscovery of indigenous languages and the appropriation of indigenous Australian material culture. Works have been borrowed from major public institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), and from a range of national private collections.
An accompanying catalogue was published, with an introduction by Dr Gene Sherman AM, a catalogue essay by Mitchell Oakley Smith and Alison Kubler, and a conversation between Christian Thompson and Alana Kushnir.