Paradise Now is a game of unequal circumstances and varying objectives that invites unlocked players to alter and redefine the game’s Score by participating in various rounds of the game. The Score is a series of directive actions that happen over each 60 minute round of the game. Unlocked players may alter the Score by navigating the space with their bodily movements, altering the various gaming mechanism at play, and by adding directive phrases to its structure. Although many players may be active in the game simultaneously, every player may choose to fill the role of player 1 or player 2 and respond accordingly to their set of directive actions in the Score throughout each round played. Each round of the game played throughout its occupation of Stamp Gallery in September & October of 2016 will be documented, archived and analyzed by our team, who will compose an accumulative Score.

lian tsai, a Taiwanese national living in the U.S. since 2008, found obtaining even one of these administrative positions next to impossible after graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art in May 2015. In September, Tsai moved into the collectively run, live/work project space penthouse gallery without plans for how to handle her quickly approaching October 1st deadline.

After a series of conversations between Tsai and kimi hanauer(a member of the Penthouse collective), the two settled on a curatorial project that would have Penthouse Gallery hire Tsai as its new Gallery Manager. Hanauer wrote a letter of hire for Tsai’s visa agent and the two quickly received notice that Tsai’s visa had been extended by one full year. As part of the contract the two wrote in this project, one of Tsai’s initial responsibilities was to organize Penthouse’s October opening. “Penthouse Gallery Presents: Lian Tsai,” documented the visa process, celebrated Tsai’s newly acquired OPT visa, and recorded the occasion of her continued residency in the United States through a durational performance performed by Tsai." - Colin Alexander for Post Office Arts Journal 

Read the full conversation between Kimi + Lian here. 

The following is a collection of documents gathered over the period of two weeks leading up to MICA’s 2015 annual school-wide commencement show which emerged during the time of the Baltimore Uprising. 

Every year, approximately two weeks before the commencement show opens to the public, huge piles of detached walls start showing up all over campus. These are the walls MICA uses to transform our metal shops, our classrooms, our studios and wood shops into traditional exhibition spaces. When audiences flood the show, the white walls attempt to lead them to disregard what actually goes on here, the daily work, discussion and upkeep of these classroom and work spaces. I am not convinced, however, that they actually succeed at hiding the reality of these spaces. As students, we know these spaces intimately, we know how they are used on the daily, we know their sounds and their smells. I suppose there are just some things that are beyond MICA’s control and much beyond MICA’s attempts at hiding. This theme of attempting disguise, is one that I have witnessed or clashed with on a few occasions over my past four years at MICA, specifically regarding MICA’s relationship with and navigation of its context: Baltimore City.

Powerful institutions, such as major news outlets or universities, too often reject the possibility that most, if not all facets of our world, ultimately stem from a contradiction of varying truths. These are the institutions that publish the catalogues, that write the histories and that exhibit the findings. In order to claim their knowledge and stability, these institutions must hide their own uncertainties and find a way of maintaining their conditional inability to control the variables which make up our world. The commencement show and its walls is just one example of MICA’s presentation of its institutional unity and stability, a disguise in itself, which inherently must disregard the paradoxes and unethical relations that define MICA, its students, faculty and staff and our relationship to the context we are based in.

This project emerged out of the need to acknowledge the context MICA's Commencement Exhibition existed in. The few documents collected in this space, which represent the two weeks surrounding Commencement, could not nearly approach the long history of systemic violence that structures this city. A violence that subsequently defines MICA’s existence and is defined and structured by MICA’s existence (whether MICA visibly acknowledges this or not). Visibility is exactly the point here. I could not possibly capture all of the facts, all of the documents, all of the efforts and beautiful moments of those two weeks, not to mention the past hundreds of years. This was not an attempt at formulating some sort of concrete conclusion or resolution. It was an attempt at surfacing one of the most important facets of any work or entity: its context. A context which MICA often works to disguise, or exist despite of. I felt it necessary that 2015's commencement catalogue be about a visibility which rejects the disguise and embraces the uncertainty and paradoxical relationships that make up this place.

In the headquarters, visitors were invited to participate in the making of the catalogue, by adding information to the archive which got bound into the publication.