You must be aged 18 or over to attend this event.

Below is a description by the artist, Jack Tan, who wrote the score for Clifford Owens’ project

“The work is called ‘Score From Guantanamo’. It is a game of chance and comprises a set of playing cards with 3 ‘suits’.

The first suit shows drawings of various body positions. These reference both life drawing and figurative sculpture as well as arrest and incarceration, since they are stress positions that allude to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and police arrest.

The second suit comprises various instructions to produce sound either with voice or body. Here I am informed by sounds from civil rights speeches, protest chants, demonstrations or physical struggle.

The third depict different parts of gallery or building architecture: a doorway, a corner, a pillar, a staircase, etc.

The player picks a card from each suit and combined, they tell the player what to perform. Besides this instruction, the rules are open. Cliff could choose to play the work on his own for a period of time as a solo performance. Play with others. Or use it to set a number of people off around the gallery or building so that lots of spaces are activated through performance at the same time.

The idea of chance not only alludes to John Cage and his idea that ‘everything is music’ and in this case for me ‘everything is art’. But it also refers to lived reality of how people (particularly Black and Asian men) are vicitmised and incarcerated randomly and arbitrarily, and how through preemptive law enforcement and the doctrine of the State of Exception, the human right to freedom the rule of law is being compromised.”

About Clifford Owens
Clifford Owens’ art has appeared in numerous group and solo exhibitions. His solo exhibitions include, “Anthology: Clifford Owens” Museum of Modern Art PS1 (2011-2012) and “Perspectives 173: Clifford Owens” Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2011); his group exhibitions include, “Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art” Contemporary Arts Museum (2012), “Greater New York 2005” Museum of Modern Art PS1 (2005), “Freestyle” The Studio Museum in Harlem (2001), and the traveling exhibition “Performance Now” (2013-14).      

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. Clifford was an artist in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.   

Clifford has received numerous grants and fellowships including the William H. Johnson Prize, Art Matters Grant, a Louis Tiffany Comfort Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the New York Community Trust, the Lambent Foundation, and the Rutgers University Ralph Bunche Distinguished Graduate Fellowship. Publications, reviews, and interviews about his work include New York Times, Art  +Auction, Village Voice, Modern Painters, Art in America, Art Forum, The New Yorker, BOMB, The Wall Street Journal, The Drama Review, Greater New York 2005, Performa: New Visual Art Performance, Rethinking Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education, and Why Art Photography? He has written for exhibition catalogues, the New York Times, Art Forum, and Performing Arts Journal.    

Clifford has lectured widely about his art practice. He has been visiting artist faculty and a guest critic at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Yale University, Harvard University, Princeton University, New York University, and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  Clifford’s project “Anthology” was the subject of a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 and his first book. Other projects and exhibitions include “Seminar,” a project about the pedagogy of performance art at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York; “Five Night’s Worth,” in conjunction with Performa13 and the traveling group exhibition “Radical Presence: Contemporary Black Performance”; “The Kiss” in collaboration with Legacy Russell at Danspace in New York City; “Photographs with an Audience: Philadelphia” and “Photographs with an Audience: Manchester.”   

Recent projects include “Better the Rebel You Know” at Cornerhouse in Manchester, England and “A Forum for Performance Art” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.   Clifford was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1971. He lives and works in New York City.