A NEW WORLD’S FAIR THAT IS ALREADY THERE
by Art Jones & Ina Wudtke
A Contribution to 2024-2025 Shared Dialogue, Shared Space (SDSS) of the Korea Art Forum:
A Series of Community-based Artistic Interventions in Public Space, Queens, Spring 2024
Date
March-May, 2024
Location
Queens Flushing
Meadows Corona Park
Concept of the project
On April 30, 1939 the New York World’s Fair opened in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens and was promoted as the “World of Tomorrow”. It hosted exhibits by 60 countries, the League of Nations, 33 states, several federal agencies and the City of New York. In 1964-1965 the park was again the location for the second New York World’s Fair and just like the first time futuristic buildings were created in the park to host exhibitions or attractions. The famous Unisphere globe from steel is one of the attractions that is still left from the second Fair. While the idea of a World Fair back in the days was to bring the world to where you live so that you do not have to go somewhere, today the situation in Queens is that the world is already there: people from all over the world live in the borough of Queens.
The artists Art Jones & Ina Wudtke flip the idea of a colonial world fair around by assembling and showing on this website a growing digital archive of interviews with cultural producers from all over the world who are currently living and working in Queens. This archive of portraits which constitute an oral documentation of the present, can also be accessed via scanning with a smart phone some of the ruins of the world fairs that can still be found in the park, as indicated on a map designed by the artists.
About the Artists
Art Jones works with sculpture, expanded media, and installation. He was raised and lives in the Bronx, New York. Jones object-based work concerns the inter-relationships between collective memory, history and power at specific locations. His live media performance involves intensive recombination of antithetical video and audio elements into a cacophonous synthesis. His multimedia and installation work often incorporates site-specific projection surfaces and interactive elements. Jones’ work often utilizes mainstream media and popular culture as raw material to be sampled, remixed, and re-combined in order to examine implicit meanings or suggest new ones. Working with a particular genre or mode, the work seeks to explore, destroy or re-orient the conventions of how information is transmitted and received. Jones’ films and media art projects have been presented internationally, most recently at Museum of Modern Art New York; Times Art Center Berlin and Beursschouwburg, Brussels.
Ina Wudtke is a conceptual artist from Berlin working international. Her research-based work questions hegemonic political discourses and strengthens counter-discourses on themes such as gender, work, housing and colonialism. From 1992–2004 she was a member of the queer-feminist artists collective NEID and edited the eponymous magazine. With Dieter Lesage, she wrote the book Black Sound White Cube (Vienna, Loecker, 2010). In 2011, she released the concept album The Fine Art of Living under her pseudonym T-INA Darling. In 2018, she published a book of the same title on her artistic work about the housing question (Berlin, Archive Books). 2018 to 2020, she was artistic researcher for documenta professor Dr. Nora Sternfeld at the Art Academy in Kassel. In 2022 her book Worker Writers was published by Motto Books, Berlin. 2024 she is a Max Kade Scholar in Residence / Charlotte M. Craig Research Scholar, for the spring semester at Rutgers University in New Brunswick / New Jersey.
About Korea Art Forum (KAF)
Founded in New York 2013, Korea Art Forum (KAF) is led by artists, scholars, and peacemakers committed to bridging the world through art, serving to advance indispensable values of art’s connectivity, relevance, and equity to create a peaceful world and enhance people’s quality of life and well-being. KAF’s goals are to fight against inequality found in the contemporary art field and promote an eco-human-centric framework of art as public engagement that enables the creation of a peaceful world of coexistence, cooperation, and shared prosperity. Operating at the intersection of the visual arts and humanities, KAF annually produces interrelated programs, Commissions, Exhibitions, Forums, and Publications, to bring together all people from the art world and beyond to share dialogues, serving to build an interconnected peaceful world and support inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility.
THANK YOU!
KAF’s 2024 SDSS projects are supported, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov. The projects are also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council and made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Additional funding is provided by the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families. We especially thank our community partners, the Immigrant Social Services, the South Bronx Unite, the Minkwon Center, Social Practice CUNY (SPCUNY), NYC Parks, the NYC Department of Transportation, and NYC Council Members Vickie Paladino, Sandra Ung, and Julie Won for supporting KAF’s projects.
