Featuring seven short videos from the KADIST collection, Donde empieza el cuerpo y acaba la tierra highlights humanity’s consequential relationship to the land. Presented at The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Mexico (April-May 2023) the exhibition was curated by del Pesco.

About the program
Essay in Terremoto

del Pesco curated a one-night screening at MACBA Barcelona during the LOOP festival, the program featured seven short videos made by artists from across the Americas. Spells Upon The Land highlights humanity’s consequential relationship to the earth. Each of the artworks in this program conjure worlds, and find the rhythm and rhyme of the landscape through acts of transformation and poetic interpretation. The program includes a snowy act of alchemy, a radioactive garden in Fukushima, an agitated animal traversing the Mexican landscape of the prickly cactus, moving to the rhythm of the landscape and learning from the white birds in Guadeloupe, a hypnotic dance casting a spell in Puerto Rico, and finally an AI-enhanced imagining of layers of migration, fire damage and ineffectual politics affecting the people of the Colombian Amazon. The screening took place November 20, 2023.

Ancient History of the Distant Future presented an international selection of artworks inserted into the historical galleries of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). The contemporary artworks made associations—critically or inspirationally—to nearby historical artworks, inviting reconsideration and reinterpretation in the present. Curated in collaboration with Jodi Throckmorton in 2019.

Review in the New York Times

Pairing one seminal work of early video art with a contemporary work from KADIST’s international collection, Double Takes was presented over 11 months (11 pairs) at MoCA Cleveland. The videos were paired for subject, formal or procedural resonance—highlighting relationships that range from the urgent to the playful, spanning generations and borders. Curated in collaboration with A. Will Brown.

City of Disappearances dramatizes a resemblence between London and San Francisco by borrowing the title of Iain Sinclair's psycho-geographic "anthology of absence" written by and about London. The exhibition imagines a transposition and exchange of the living-imaginary of London conjured in Sinclair's book with the fictions and myths of San Francisco. A collaboration between the Zabludowicz Collection (London) and KADIST, the exhibition was curated by Joseph Del Pesco and Elizabeth Neilson.

Like the contributions to Sinclair's book, there are many "cities of shadows" that appear in the exhibition; recognizable as corporeal vanishings, filmic echoes from the past dissolving in the present, and contaminated memories. The photographs, videos, painting and sculptures evoke the personal experience of the individual in the city, cinematic fictions of the city as idea, and aesthetic distillations of the glow and texture of the urban. Whether we observe the formation of cities by their inhabitants or the formation of inhabitants by the cities in which they live, we recognize the city as a primary dilemma, a tension that informs all the works on view.

Exhibition poster
Video Tour

The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh hosted an exact replica of artist-curator Sohrab Kashani’s apartment in Tehran and all of its contents. The installation was organized by artist Jon Rubin and built meticulously by a team of fabricators. What followed were a series of mirror prorgams presented in both locations, including a series of exhibitions and events... where every object, video, or performance appearing in one space was meticulously duplicated in the other. For the first program (appearing in both spaces), del Pesco collaborated with Kashani on a video program that combined the work of American and Iranian artists, titled Voice-over (in three parts).

"Secret Society" at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

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Co-curated by Joseph del Pesco and Sergio Edelsztein, the exhibition Lives Between begins with a recognition of the growing number of international artists working and living between two places. Artists who were born in one country and, for a variety of reasons, have crossed oceans and borders to live in another. Because of this transition, their artistic practice and cultural identity is caught in tension between their country of residence and country of origin.

Some of the artists in the show migrated with their families as children, or were born somewhere else, but carry with them another culture through their parents, or through the color of their skin, and chose to make this paradox a aspect or impetus for their work. Others migrated later as adults, in a conscious move to improve their professional possibilities. Others simply move to survive.

In this way, these artists choose to live “in between” two places. Developing their personal and professional life in one place (working, raising a family), but when producing their work they address social and historical issues relevant “back home”. Many of them produce exclusively in their country or region of origin. Upon returning they realize they are both insider and outsider, and in a sense inhabit a third culture that exists between the two places. They come to learn the benefits and challenges of an interstitial identity.

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Exhibition Booklet

In 2013, del Pesco collaborated with the legendary experimental film institution Canyon Cinema, to present a pop-up shop and exhibition. Visitors were invited to browse and loan up to three titles from a selection of 190 DVDs by over 50 artists, a survey of Canyon Cinema’s histoically significant archive of 8 and 16mm film. Adjacent to the storefront was a micro-cinema that hosted a series of screening events. del Pesco also redesigned Canyon Cinema's logo, using a flyer made by the iconic Bay Area artist Bruce Connor as a starting point. They have continued to use the logo following the exhibition.

18 protest posters by artists, letterpress printed at a 100 year old printshop, were displayed as placards alongside take-away stacks, In Protest was a one-night distribution event at the Berkeley Art Museum. Organized by Joseph del Pesco and Constance Lewallen in 2012.

Video of the distribution event

On Being an Exhibition at Artists Space in 2007, was inspired by Michael Asher’s “Situational Aesthetics” as a point of departure toward the development of an exhibition that thinks about this pre-conditioning of the viewer, the physical language of the gallery, and the packaging and promotion of its contents.

The Black Market Type & Print Shop was a survey of typography by artists, sourced from artists catalogs and converted into working fonts. The exhibition travelled from Articule in Montréal, to the gallery at PNCA, Portland Oregon, and the museum at UC Davis, California.

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