Thursday, September 26th 5–6 p.m. in the Weitz Cinema, followed by a reception 6–7 p.m. in the Perlman Teaching Museum
On occasion of the exhibition opening, artist Jill Magid will be in conversation with Sara Cluggish, Mary Hulings Rice Director and Curator of the Perlman Teaching Museum. They will discuss narratives of surveillance, control, and trickery in Bank Job and Magid’s artistic practice, leading to a discussion of the social, political, and economic themes in Magid’s public artwork Tender. In this artwork 120,000 newly-minted 2020 pennies edge-engraved with the phrase, “THE BODY WAS ALREADY SO FRAGILE” entered the U.S. economy via New York City bodegas. Presented in the context of Bank Job, the project consists of a sculpture and 28-minute film which follows the circulation of Tender pennies and their afterlives.
About the Artist
Jill Magid is an artist, writer and filmmaker. Magid interrogates structures of power on an intimate level, exploring the emotional, philosophical, and legal tensions between institutions and individual agency. Throughout her work, Magid has initiated intimate relations with a number of organizations and structures of authority. She explores the emotional, philosophical, and legal tensions between the individual and ‘protective’ institutions, such as intelligence agencies or the police. To work alongside or within large organizations, Magid makes use of institutional quirks, systemic loopholes that allow her to make contact with people “on the inside.” Her work tends to be characterized by the dynamics of seduction, the resulting narratives often taking the form of a love story. It is typical of Magid’s practice that she follows the rules of engagement with an institution to the letter — sometimes to the point of absurdity.
Her first documentary feature, The Proposal, premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival and was released in theaters across the US and Canada with Oscilloscope Laboratories. Magid has installed solo exhibitions around the world at institutions including M Leuven, Belgium; Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Berkeley Museum of Art, California; Tate Liverpool, UK; the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam; Yvon Lambert, Paris and New York; Gagosian Gallery, New York; Labor, Mexico City; and the Security and Intelligence Agency of the Netherlands. She has participated in Manifesta, as well as the Liverpool, Bucharest, Singapore, Incheon, Gothenburg, Oslo and Performa Biennials. Magid is the recipient of a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2021 VIA Art Fund Grant, a 2020 Creative Time Artists Commission and the 2017 Calder Prize, and is the author of four novellas.