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Project Website: http://slought.org/content/11258/
The Annenberg Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania, in collaboration with Slought Foundation, a non-profit organization rethinking contemporary art, in partnership with Peregrine Arts, present "The Revolt of the Bees, Wherein the Future of the Paper-Hive is Declared," an exhibition from January 7-March 7, 2005. Please note that this exhibition is on display on the 6th floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library (Locust Walk between 34th and 36th Streets), and not at Slought Foundation. It is open to the public on Monday-Friday from 9:00am to 4:45pm, and Saturday from Noon to 4:00pm. Information on events organized in conjunction with the exhibition is available online, including: Anthony Grafton on "Literary Honeycombs: Storage and Retrieval of Texts Before Modern Times" (February 17th at 5pm); and a special screening of the film "in which the thinking man finds himself in a gigantic orphanage...", with remarks to follow by Aaron Levy on the making of the film and the curating of the exhibition (February 21th at 5pm).
"The Revolt of the Bees" proposes a new culture of memory and archiving in the true spirit of the beehive. It takes as its starting point the assumption that modern memory is first of all archival, and that the beehive and the paper hive (an archive or library) both fancy themselves utopias in which modern memory is stored up, as honey or as knowledge. The exhibition is comprised of eleven lessons extracted from a larger examination of beehive metaphors in the rare book and manuscript collections of the University of Pennsylvania. These lessons envision the archive of the future as an organization open to the infinite possibilities of its own becoming. "The Revolt of the Bees" also explores theories of curatorial innovation and approaches curatorial practice as an evolving and future-oriented field, prompting questions such as how one might renew or reinvent an archival collection by constructing a new genealogy around a historical concept, and to whom or what a curator is ultimately responsible.
Whereas the beehive metaphor continues to influence contemporary cultural practices, this exhibition also features innovative work by twentieth-century architects such as Arakawa+Gins, whose work makes explicit references to the hive, the trans-human, and a Duchampian reconsideration of everyday life. Commencing with the January opening, the exhibition will also feature an installation organized by curator Aaron Levy with artist Michael Zansky that features a decentralized constellation of distortion lenses and theatrical devices within which is playing a video documenting a romantically degraded library in Founder's Hall at Girard College, a magnificent Greek Revival structure of the 19th century. The video explores the idea of a collection in demise at a vulnerable and destructive moment in its history, and invites its audience to imaginatively recreate and reconfigure the history of an archive through contemporary practice. (More information on the video and a list of upcoming screenings is also available)
Bees… offer to man the most beautiful example of community that we could ever find. —Alfred Boucher, c1902
 Read More About this Project (PDF Download)
Aaron Levy is the Executive Director of and a Senior Curator at Slought Foundation. In 2004 he edited, with Eduardo Cadava, Cities Without Citizens, with contributions by Gayatri Spivak, Arakawa+Gins, and Giorgio Agamben, among others. This publication was adapted from an installation he organized at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia in 2003 engaging the idea of the Early American city in the archive. He teaches contemporary art and curatorial practice in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania.
This program is made possible in part through the generous sponsorship or support of Walter H. & Leonore Annenberg Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania, in collaboration with Slought Foundation, in partnership with Peregrine Arts. Curated by Aaron Levy, Associate Curator Thaddeus Squire, with research assistance by Erica Fruiterman. Sculpture and video: Aaron Levy, Michael Zansky.
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