Joshua Schwebel

Interviews from Yale Radio / Artists, Curators and more

Joshua Schwebel is a conceptual artist interested in the relationship between value and visibility. His work reveals the concept of value as a cultural construct borne through hidden ties to morality and privilege, by exposing the cultural and social techniques employed in value construction. In his work he devises strategies to reveal the politics of exclusion, expropriation, and competition that both mandate and conceal the conditions of valuation in late Capitalism. Through strategic interventions, displacements, and withdrawals, he attempts to unbalance and open up these seemingly impartial processes.

His practice can be located within the lineage of dematerialized and anti-commercial practices that emerged from the avant-garde such as conceptual art and Institutional Critique.

Schwebel received an MFA from NSCAD University (2008) and a BFA in Interdisciplinary Fine Arts from Concordia University (2006). Recent exhibitions and projects include Linings, a private installation in Tadeusz Kantor’s forest house (Gdow, Poland, 2016); No, No, No, After You, KNULP (Sydney, Australia, 2016); Working Conditions, TPW (Toronto, 2016); as well numerous projects in other Canadian and international venues. He is the recipient of a Research/Creation grant from the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres de Québec and the Laureate of the Résidence Croisées France/Québec, supported by the Quartier Éphémère/ Fonderie Darling, Montréal/Paris. He was artist in residence at the Québec Studio in Berlin at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, for the year of 2015.

Privation 2016 | contractually de ned extraction, Kienzle Art Foundation, Berlin In this work I developed a contract between myself and art collector Jochen Kienzle which permitted me 20 minutes unsupervised and alone in his Berlin home and established that while I was alone in the flat I would remove a single object. The identity of this extracted object – one that is so banal that its disappearance is unnoticeable – is to perpetually remain a secret, unknown to Herr Kienzle and withheld from public knowledge. The extraction introduces an undetermined absence into the collector’s domestic space. The Kienzle art collection also acquires this intervention, in the form of a signified but empty ‘unknown’, as an artwork within its holdings. image: Jochen Kienzle posed in his living room, 2016

Subsidy 2015 | intervention using exhibition budget, unpaid interns, o ce furniture and o ce supplies An intervention enacted during a year-long residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien. I used my exhibition budget (€3.000) to compensate the normally unpaid interns who work in the institution’s administrative offices. A total of seven interns were paid for their work in the KB office.