Since 2003, Sarah Pierce has used the term - The Metropolitan Complex - to describe her project. Despite its institutional resonance, this title does not signify an organisation. Instead, it demonstrates Pierce's broad understanding of cultural work, articulated through various working methods, involving papers, interviews, archives, talks and exhibitions. Characterized as a way to play with the hang-ups (read 'complex' in the Freudian sense) that surround cultural work, one emphasis is a shared neuroses of 'place', whether a specific locality or a wider set of circumstances that frame interaction. Central to her activity is a consideration of forms of gathering, both historical examples and those she initiates. The processes of research and presentation that Pierce undertakes highlight a continual renegotiation of the terms for making art: the potential for dissent and self-determination, the slippages between individual work and institutional context, and the proximity of past artworks.
I'm interested in how knowledge can rebel, not in opposition, but in spite of inheritances that form us. We are as much implicated by what we love as what we despise; how we enact these dependencies led to the project that I call The Metropolitan Complex.
- Sarah Pierce, Legacies in Art, De Appel, Amsterdam 2007.
Recent projects include: By now we share and affinity, Townhouse Cairo, 2010; The question would be the answer to the question 'Are you happy?', Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 2010 and Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, 2009, and An artwork in the third person, Project Arts Centre, Dublin 2009, all commissioned by If I Can't Dance I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution, Episode III; It's time man. It feels imminent, ICA London 2008; The Meaning of Greatness, Project Arts Centre 2006. Her work has been included in group exhibitions including: Feminist Legacies and Potentials, MuHKA Antwerp 2007; Left Pop, 2nd Moscow Biennale 2007, Coalecse, Redux London and SMART Amsterdam 2005 and 2009; and Romantic Detachment, PS1 New York 2004, a.o. In 2005 she was one of seven artists who represented Ireland at the 51st Venice Biennale. She regularly publishes The Metropolitan Complex Papers, and continues to collaborate with Annie Fletcher on the Paraeducation Department which began in 2004. Her published writing can be found in various texts including: Curating and the Educational Turn Open Editions, 2010; Re-inventing Radio, Kunstradio 2008; Curating Subjects, Open Editions 2007; Make Everything New, a project on communism, Book Works 2006; Looking Encountering Staging, Piet Zwart Institute 2005, Put About, a critical anthology on independent writing, Book Works 2005; Meanwhile Someplace Else, Sala Rekalde 2005; and Tracer 1 and 2, Witte de With 2004, a.o.
Interests: Archives; Community and the communal; Student work; Rebellion and knowledge; Gestural and affective "ways of knowing"; Conversation.