Dispatch

Howie Chen and Gabrielle Giattino’s curatorial partnership, DISPATCH , seeks to edit and to refine; to produce and to transmit information. From the small confines of the Dispatch Office, currently in New York City, a pinpoint or locus is traced along a multi-faceted plane of information. Strategies of diffusion and communication are elaborated as simple concepts of “exhibition-making” are dismissed. Could the most interesting performance exist without an audience? Can spaces be linked across geographical borders, through diverse channels, the same way ideas are spread?

Dispatch offers a model for curatorial production: an office for receiving and originating exhibitions, projects, and concepts treated as time-sensitive transmissions. Responding to a curatorial field that is increasingly preoccupied with institutional self-administration and formalized bureaucracies, the activities of Dispatch reflect the independent ability to mobilize with tactical urgency, editorial decisiveness, and critical rigor. The office, however manifested (virtual or as ad hoc physical locations functioning as base for operations or temporary relay posts), will in its production act as a flexible international conduit and local reception site.

Chen and Giattino have collaborated on exhibitions and projects presented at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, and the Swiss Institute. Giattino was formerly a Curator at the Swiss Institute, New York, and Chen was Senior Curatorial Coordinator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.