OVERGRADUATION
OVERGRADUATION
Contract, pg. 1
The Temporary Exhibition Agreement Contract for Overgraduation was published in late March in the Compound Yellow Manual of Prompts, Provocations, Permissions & Parameters for Everyday Practices of the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago.
Overgraduation evolved from an invitation of the Het Nieuwe Institute, Rotterdam. The original concept, however, required alteration due to the nature of the proposal and the Coronavirus outbreak. Below is an excerpt of the initial concept:
Overgraduation attempts to block the exhibition budget funds of €50.000 from the Het Nieuwe Instituut exhibition into a physical treasury and an object for public sight. By reorienting the budget, we use the exhibition to approach the real questions at hand: How to engage a viewer with values rather than objects? What values can pedagogical exhibitions set into motion for students when graduation is over? How can an exhibition help produce alternative forms of generating money, and therefore making a living for an artist?
Primarily, the Contract aims to clarify and legalize the reorientation of the budget and the bond between exhibition participants, vis a vis the Institute. The Contract also underlines the ,sexiness‘ of the product, which is, that at the end of the exhibition, each participant receives the same amount of money regardless of their individual contribution. The contract thus becomes a promise to reorient the funds productively, and break from conventional routines of how budgets are usually spent within a museum exhibition context.