Fillip

January 11, 2010 / Dear Silvia… July 2009 consists of all e-mail messages received by artist Silvia Kolbowski during July 2009 from many non-profit political organizations, exhorting her to attend to a wide variety of urgent issues. These missives, edited down from 16,000 words to 3,000 words, and all opening with the (algorithimically aided) personal address “Dear Silvia,” are read by a 12 year old girl. The work questions the symptoms of US democracy that these exhortations represent.

Dear Silvia… July 2009 was commissioned by Fillip as a limited edition multiple in collaboration with a talk organized by Maria Fusco at Whitechapel Gallery, London, in October 2009 as part of Living Clay: Art Writing Readings. A one-sided acetate LP of the work is available in an edition of 25. A text version of the piece, accompanied by an essay on “indirect speech” by Antonia Hirsch, will be published in Fillip 11, available worldwide in February.

Silvia Kolbowski is an artist based in New York. Her scope of address includes the ethics and politics of history, culture, feminism, and the unconscious. Her most recent project, a video and photo work entitled After Hiroshima Mon Amour (2008), opened as a solo exhibition at LAX>October, teaches in the CCC program at the Geneva University of Art and Design, and in September will begin co-directing a new PhD in Practice program at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.