Ben Kinmont

Ben Kinmont

Tuesday 29th June 2010, at 7pm at Bétonsalon, Paris 13

« I am very interested in the possibilities and limitations of helping others in an art practice. When moving outside of the gallery or museum and into a public realm where value structures and needs differ, artists attempt to address an urgent need to broaden the cultural discourse by incorporating an exchange of values and information with people not usually included in the art discourse. This decentralization away from the art world and market is often accompanied by a (sometimes utopian) desire to help the situation of others in a way that is not being addressed by art institutions. »
Extract from Ben Kinmont's project The Digger Dug (part one) 2004, Air de Paris.

Ben Kinmont looks at interpersonal communication as a means of addressing the problems of contemporary society. His sculptures and actions attempt to establish a direct, personal relationship between the artist and the viewer, using the work as mediator. Ben Kinmont has used the term "Third Sculpture" since 1988 to describe his work out on the street and in stranger's homes. He explores the way art can function in the social sphere but also within various notions of value and exchange. In his curatorial project « The materialization of Life into alternative economies » (1996) he brought together several artists working with different notions of economy and distribution. My reasons were to offer another reading of Lippard's idea of conceptual art as a dematerialization of the art object and, instead, suggest that perhaps, for some, it was actually not so much about the art object but about life, about a materialization of life." One of his recent projects includes On becoming something else (2009) and was presented at the Pompidou and in different Parisian restaurants

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