Name: Alexander Provan
Place of Birth: USA
Year of Birth: 1983
Areas of Work: writing, editing, publishing, art-making
Webseite: -
Alexander Provan is the editor of Triple Canopy, a magazine and publishing platform based in New York. He is also a contributing editor of Bidoun, a magazine of the arts and culture of the Middle East and its diaspora. His writing on digital culture, aesthetics, literature, and politics has appeared in The Nation, The Believer, n+1, Bookforum, Artforum, and Frieze, among other publications. Triple Canopy has recently participated in exhibitions and organized public programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City) as part of the 2014 Whitney Biennial; the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 (New York City); the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver; Artissima 18 (Torino, Italy); and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson. Provan is a fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics for 2013–2015 and the recipient of a 2011 art and research grant from the Centro Cultural Montehermoso Kulturunea,Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain.
Provan’s work - which melds writing, editing, publishing, and art-making - is primarily concerned with the relationships between representation, technology, and politics. With Triple Canopy, Provan works on collaborative artistic and literary projects, public programs, print objects, and technological experiments, so as to cultivate a critical perspective on the relationship between technology, culture, and the politics of public space. Triple Canopy is devoted to sustained inquiry and creative research - to making a public, and thus a living culture, one that accumulates and reverberates rather than being bracketed and bucketed, monetized and dispersed. In his own work, Provan focuses on the ways in which conditions of production and prevailing structures (social, technological, economic) circumscribe thought and expression while also supplying means and material with which to scrutinize those very phenomena.
Provan is currently working on a research and publication project having to do with standards, ubiquitous and largely invisible tools for organizing social and economic life - they govern container shipping and scientific research, the compression of images and the regulation of Internet protocols, the distribution of food aid and the classification of literature. The project will investigate the social effects and political dimensions of rampant standardization, while also treating standards as (potentially rewarding) aesthetic problems, asking how and where we can meaningfully exploit and resist standardization.
Sommerakademie 2014
Opening/Nominators' Day
15. August 2014, Zentrum Paul Klee.
Video by David Röthlisberger
