Live Stream:
Surfacing Buried Channels
May 26, 2023, 6pm
Swamp cocktail hour, 6 pm
Ribbon-cutting ceremony and reading, 7 pm
Taking cues from the Canal Street catacombs – local lore that describes a network of underground tunnels beneath Canal Street – Canal Street Research Association inaugurates a new longer-term underground archive, devoted to surfacing buried channels.
This new zone is part storage and part sculpture, designed in collaboration with architectural collective common room and conceived in collaboration with poet-painter Basie Allen and artist Craig Jun Li working with curatorial duo ACOMPI. Rainwater and leaks collected on-site form an inconspicuous circulation system flowing through shifting archival materials collected by the fictional office of Canal Street Research Association.
These underground flows are further circulated by Live Stream, a new virtual channel that will stream occasional happenings in the Canal Street Research Association basement archive. These may include interviews with neighbors and vendors, poetry and performance, as well as surfaced waters.
To celebrate the opening of the new archival sculpture, the night will begin with swamp cocktails followed by a ribbon-cutting ceremony with a collaged reading of watery texts by Canal Street Research Association and Basie Allen. This project brings into play a nexus of relationships that skirt the edges of official and unofficial, formal and informal, real and fake, above and below.
Basie Allen
A poet and visual artist from New York City’s Lower East Side. His work carves parentheses in-between dirt and feeling.
CJ Li
Craig Jun Li has an object-oriented practice that centers image and object circulation as the axis of perversion, utilizing residues of various alternative histories to investigate their contemporary resonance. These inquiries often take the form of ever-shifting installations composed of delicate and perishable materials.
Common Room
Is a collaborative platform based in New York City and Brussels comprised of architects Lars Fischer, Maria Ibañez and Todd Rouhe; Rachel Himmelfarb; architectural researcher Kim Förster; and graphic designer Geoff Han.
Canal Street Research Association
Canal Street Research Association opened in a disused storefront in Lower Manhattan in October 2020, as a temporary center of operations for artist duo Shanzhai Lyric who used the space to collect and reflect upon the history and culture of the New York City neighborhood through screenings, talks, roving exhibitions and re-stagings. Canal Street Research Association currently operates out of the basement of Canal Projects.
ACOMPI
Founded by Constanza Valenzuela and Jack Radley, ACOMPI is a global curatorial project based in New York City. ACOMPI foregrounds interdisciplinary practice and collaboration and serves as a youth-oriented, community-ingrained platform to expand the intersection of independent curatorial practice and site-responsive public engagement. Recent projects include: Money Has No Smell at CUE Art Foundation, Transient Grounds on Governors Island, Shanzhai Lyric: Canal Street Research Association, and the colloquium “What Can NYC Art Museums Do For Immigrants?” at NYU Steinhardt. Their exhibitions have been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, New York Magazine, artnet, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail, among other publications.
