Simon Denny Exhibition "Read Write Own" Opens February 22nd
Organized in conjunction with Petzel 35 E 67th Street; shows 'Dungeon' & 'Multi-User Dungeon' opening Feb 21st.
Dunkunsthalle is pleased to present Read Write Own, an exhibition of Simon Denny’s recent landscape paintings of digital land plots, alongside sculptures made of whiteboards decommissioned from the Twitter offices when Elon Musk took over and rebranded the company. The artworks resonate with Dunkunsthalle’s space—a disused Dunkin’ Donuts in the financial district—as they are all objects that carry histories of earlier usages, previous lives, and participation in other economies.
Each painting portrays a tokenized visual representation (often resembling a simple stylized map or plan) that the owner of a piece of “metaverse” property receives when they purchase a plot of digital land in virtual world projects like Decentraland, The Sandbox, or Voxels—some of the earliest and most popular ventures invested in during the recent crypto/metaverse boom.
Whiteboards from the offices of Twitter’s campus in San Francisco, many with residual markings from Twitter’s developers, have been sculpted with a laser-cut that slices a “plus” symbol (the exact “plus” used when mobile tweeters begin a tweet in the current X user interface) into the center of each board. The negative space produced in the center of each board by these “plus” extractions resembles a window, a graph, even arrow slits in castles or heraldry from shields—or a targeting system. These altered boards are hung between each painting, perpendicular to the walls of the old Dunkin’ Donuts, forming a kind of viewing division with a cross-shaped window throughout the space.
The title of the exhibition, Read Write Own, refers to entrepreneur and investor Chris Dixon’s description of the evolution of the internet from a “read only” series of brochures, through the advent of user generated written content (social media), to the current rhetoric advancing a new stage of ownership possibilities enabled by web 3. As technologies change the way we see the world, ownership and shifting notions around what and how we own property (real estate, virtual property) shift in kind. Dixon’s book of the same name has been published this year, and works from Denny’s landscape series will appear alongside an a16z book event at SxSW in Austin in March.
As a part of the exhibition’s events with Dunkunsthalle, Landscapes, a publication documenting all of Denny’s landscape paintings will be launched. The 360-page book is published by Munich publishers Sorry Press, co-founded by Lukas Kubina and Mortiz Wiegand alongside the Frans Masereel Centrum and the Kunstverein Hannover. An event on Saturday, February 24th at TJ Byrne’s—a local Financial District bar—will feature a conversation between Denny and Dunkunsthalle associates Julia Kaganskiy and Joshua Citarella.
SIMON DENNY Read Write Own
February 22 – March 31, 2024
Dunkunsthalle, 64 Fulton St
Opening Reception: Thursday February 22, 6–8pm
“Landscapes” Book Launch & Talk
Saturday, February 24, 2024
TJ Byrne’s, 77 Fulton St, 4-6pm
Read Write Own at Dunkunsthalle is organized in conjunction with Petzel
Dungeon
February 21 – March 30, 2024
35 E 67th Street, Parlor Floor
&
Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) curated by Simon Denny
February 21 – March 30, 2024
35 E 67th Street, Third Floor
Featuring Jack Goldstein, etoy.corporation, Öyvind Fahlström, Genevieve Goffman, Matthias Groebel, Peter Halley, Yngve Holen, Josh Kline, Isabelle Frances McGuire, Seth Price, Harris Rosenblum, Avery Singer, Suzanne Treister, and Anicka Yi.
Opening Receptions: Wednesday, February 21, 6–8pm
More information on Dungeon & Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) can be found here
About Simon Denny
Simon Denny (born 1982 Auckland) lives and works in Berlin. He makes artworks that unpack stories about technology using a variety of media, including painting, web-based media, installation, sculpture, print, and video. He studied at the University of Auckland and at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main.
Solo exhibitions include Kunstverein Hannover (2023); Frans Masereel Centrum (2023); the Gus Fisher Gallery, University of Auckland (2022); Outernet, London (2022); K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2020); the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), Tasmania (2019); MOCA, Cleveland (2018); OCAT, Shenzhen (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2016); Serpentine Galleries, London (2015); MoMA PS1, New York (2015); Portikus, Frankfurt (2014); MUMOK, Vienna (2013); Kunstverein Munich (2013).
Denny represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. Denny has curated exhibitions such as Proof of Stake at Kunstverein in Hamburg (2021) and Proof of Work at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2018). His works are represented in major institutional collections, including MoMA (New York), Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Düsseldorf), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Buffalo AKG (Buffalo), Kunsthaus Zürich (Zürich), Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundes-republik Deutschland (Berlin), and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Wellington).
He cofounded the artist mentoring program BPA//Berlin Program for Artists and has served as a professor of time-based media at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg.
Dunkunsthalle is an artist-run, not-for-profit exhibition space. Click subscribe below to receive the most up-to-date info about all upcoming events.
** We are currently looking for long-term and short-term partners to help us with infrastructure and operations. If interested, respond to this email or contact us via this form for more information.
Please consider a paid tier to support the continuation of our mission.
Or visit our store:
https://dunkunsthalle.company.site
All proceeds go to Dunkunsthalle’s operations.