PIER 52: Immersive Art Happening with Bordello Collective

About the Project:

Originally commissioned by Middlesbrough Art Weekender, England, ’Pier 52’ is an ongoing project and collaboration between Bordello Collective and the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark. The project explores, examines and recontextualise’s Matta-Clark’s seminal work ‘Days End’ through a queer lens, placing a focus on the social context and history of the Hudson River piers as a cruising site, as a space of connection and as a space of risk. Beginning as a live art response to Matta-Clark’s ‘Days End’, editions of ’Pier 52’ fuse soundscape, video, physicality and installation into live art interventions. 

About the Happening:

Building on the foundations presented in the original ‘Pier 52’ work Bordello Collective artists Vision-25c and DYAD present a special and unique edition of a ‘Pier 52’ live art happening for Epsilon Spires. Responding to their experiences in visiting the original site of Pier 52, David Hammond's 2021 sculpture ‘Days End’, the 1979 pornographic film ‘Pier Groups’, filmed on Pier 52 in and around the cuttings of ‘Days Ends’ and deeper research into the creation and background of Matta-Clark’s original 1975 ‘Days End’. The event image is from Pier 52, live art response presented at Middlesbrough Art Weekender 2021.

About Bordello Collective:

Bordello are a Queer arts collective creating interventions that wrap the witness up in Queer space. They are masters of making work that responds to space, place and people. Based in and around the Teesside area of North East England, Bordello Collective artists work across a range of diverse mediums and each identify themselves, their work and/or their world view as Queer. Work is cross media, often performative and multidimensional. Collective collaborators produce work in a spectrum of formats including performance, installation, sound, audiovisual, movement, digital media, design, collage and more.

They are adept at fusing diverse mediums into immersive live art happenings. Work is produced through collaborative processes and presented in a range of places and spaces for a diverse spectrum of people.

Instagram: @bordellocollective - Website: www.bordellocollective.com

About Gordon Matta-Clark (1943 - 1978)

A central figure of the downtown New York art scene in the 1970s, Gordon Matta-Clark pioneered a radical approach to art making that directly engaged the urban environment and the communities within it. Through his many projects—including large-scale architectural interventions in which he physically cut through buildings slated for demolition—Matta-Clark developed a singular and prodigious oeuvre that critically examined the structures of the built environment. With actions and experimentations across a wide range of media, his work transcended the genres of performance, conceptual, process, and land art, making him one of the most innovative and influential artists of his generation. The artist’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide, including Gordon Matta-Clark: "You Are The Measure," a retrospective held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2007–2008). In 2017–2020, Matta-Clark’s work was the focus of a critically acclaimed traveling exhibition, Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect, that was on view at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia; and the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. Recent institutional solo exhibitions were presented at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria (2021–2022), and MAMCO Genève, Switzerland (2022–2023). The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark has been represented by David Zwirner since 1998, and his work is held in numerous international collections.