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Keep
Shop: A show about holding on to what you want.
KEEP SHOP is the name of the show, but will also be a sort of work-in-progress
terminology for a number of projects in the coming year.
KEEP SHOP Vendor Archive
Using the familiar „Mom and Pop Shop“ (Tante Emma Laden) as
a departure point, the Keep Shop Vendor Archive consists primarily of
• Shops with an atmosphere that is more the exception than the rule.
• Shops with hands-on proprietor engagement.
• Shops that display owner obsessions and preoccupations.
• Shops with rarified, curated inventory.
• Shops that look amazing.
This is by no means a comprehensive collection.
With its inclusion in the exhibition, we are opening up the Archive to
public suggestion. Please submit your suggestions for further Berlin based
inclusions into this archive. You will be able to track the progress of
the Archive by following:
www.volksboutique.org
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BIOGRAPHY
Christine Hill is an artist and musician and the proprietor
of Volksboutique, a former second-hand shop turned production facility
operating out of Brooklyn, New York and Berlin, Germany.
Hill's work proposes new investigations into mixed-media installation
and performance. Mimicking contemporary forms of popular entertainment
(for example, producing a television talk show in a New York gallery,
in Pilot, 2000), imitating paradigms of elite advertising, and deploying
businesses as art projects (a second-hand clothing store in Berlin, Volksboutique
in 1996-97, a fully operable tour guide agency in New York in 1999) Hill
investigates the proximity of contemporary art to mass entertainment,
consumerism, and popular culture. In the process, she proposes new roles
for viewers (as consumers, tourists, members of a TV audience), redefines
artistic spaces of exhibition (as stores, studios, catwalks), and reinvents
a mobile artistic identity (whether as talk show host, store owner, or
tour guide). She defines these interventions as 'Organizational Ventures.'
Volksboutique functions as producer of these Organizational Ventures,
and also as a lifestyle catalog and comprehensive daily life archive.
Manifestations of this archive include the "Volksboutique Reference
Library" (included in the retrospective "Volksboutique Organizational
Ventures" at MigrosMuseum in Zurich and at GFZK in Leipzig); the
"Volksboutique Accounting Archive" (Liverpool Biennial, 2002)
and the "Volksboutique Style Manual" (Galerie EIGEN+ART, 2003).
Volksboutique's production sites are The Products Division in the former
Eberhard Faber Pencil Factory in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and The Outpost
Division in Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin.
Hill has exhibited and lectured widely internationally. She has been the
subject of numerous publications and she shows regularly. Recent solo
exhibitions include Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York; Galerie EIGEN+ART,
Berlin; the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig; the
MigrosMuseum in Zurich and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland.
She was included in documenta X in 1997, and has participated in numerous
international group exhibitions. Her work has been reviewed extensively,
including in Artforum, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Art in America
and in considerable international publications. The "Volksboutique
Style Manual" is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. A
new Volksboutique project will be included in the 2007 Venice Biennial
under the curation of Robert Storr.
Christine Hill is currently Guest Professor of Media, Trend and Public
Appearance at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany.
A comprehensive publication - Inventory: The Work of Christine Hill and
Volksboutique - is available, published by Hatje/Cantz with US distribution
by DAP/Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.
It features essays by Doris Berger, Barbara Steiner, and Lucy R. Lippard.
Please see also: www.volksboutique.org
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