Clifford Owens in conversation

On the occasion of Clifford Owens’s debut European exhibition, Better the Rebel You Know, at Cornerhouse, Manchester (10 May – 17 August 2014), Iniva hosted the artist in conversation with curator, Daniella Rose King, discussing Owens’ practice and the recently-opened exhibition.

This is the first event in a series in partnership with Cornerhouse Manchester aiming to develop a way for artists to have a wider presentation platform across England.

About the event

Owens’ work explores the intersection of photography, video, text and performance. His practice seeks to challenge the boundaries of performative work and the possibilities of interaction between artist and audience.

Better the Rebel You Know features key existing works and two significant new commissions, including Photographs with an Audience: Manchester and Anthology, which debuted at MoMA PS1, New York in 2011. Anthology originated from a series of 28 performance ‘scores’: short, diverse sets of instructions (some specific, others open to interpretation) solicited by Owens from a selection of African American artists, from established to emerging figures. For the UK edition, Owens has gathered scores from 20 British artists. Photographs with an Audience: Manchester is part of an international project undertaken by Owens with audiences in various cities, as a way of exploring the underlying social tensions and relations within divergent communities.

Artist Biography

Clifford Owens was born in Baltimore in 1971, and lives and works in New York City. He studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Mason Gross School of Visual Arts Rutgers University and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He was an artist in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

His solo exhibitions include Anthology: Clifford Owens, Museum of Modern Art New York PS1 (2011-2012) and Perspectives 173: Clifford Owens, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2011). Group exhibitions include Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2012), and The Studio Museum in Harlem (2013) and Deliverance, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2012).

Curator biography

Daniella Rose King is an independent curator and writer. In 2012 she was Program Curator at MASS Alexandria, an independent study and studio programme for artists in Egypt. She writes regularly for Art Monthly, Frieze, Art-Agenda, Ibraaz, Universes in Universe – Worlds of Art, Portal 9, Harper’s Bazaar Art and Contemporary And, and has contributed essays to Hatje Cantz’s On One Side of the Same Water: Artistic Practice between Tirana and Tangier (Germany, 2012) and an interview with John Akomfrah for The Right Dissonance (London, 2011) a collection of interviews between emerging curators and artists.