Captivity Report

Captivity Report is situated against the dominant backdrop of a world interrupted, and a city effectively shut down for much of the past six months. Captivity Report shines light upon the practices of seventeen individual and collaborative practices, at least normally, working and producing art and research within the studios of Gertrude. Presented at a trepidatious time, emerging out of the long, dark shadows of broad, ordinated lockdown, extreme constrictions of personal freedoms, fear of an omnipresent contagion, and seemingly endless solitude, this project forms as a slow reintroduction between the work of artists and the public.

Staged across sites in the public realm, Captivity Report counters the broad closure of galleries for much of the year, while reflecting upon the curtailing of artists’ access to the sites in which their works are produced. How does one produce work outside of its traditional sites of production? What is essential work? What are the urgencies of this moment? Will this moment ever end? Captivity Report confronts and evades many of these concerns to create a type of collective document of this moment. It is at once a reflection on art production in a time of societal lockdown, a means of creating artistic encounters outside of the gallery space and not mediated through laptops, and abstractly, a visualised report on humanity at this moment, living under conditions of captivity arguably in result of our impact upon the environment.