Artist Paul Andrew – Performing the Archive: AXIS Art Projects, Artist-Run Wunderkammer #1, Does New York Exist? BNE-NYC 1988-2016, 12 Helen Street, Teneriffe, BARI FESTIVAL 2016
“Does New York Exist?” specifically references a famous historical project by the Australian media art collective AXIS Art Projects.Formed in Brisbane in 1987 by artists Jay Younger, Lehan Ramsay, and Paul Andrew, the collective created an exhibition and archival series titled Does New York Exist? (BNE-NYC 1988). Funded by the Australia Council, the project involved a three-month residency and guerrilla art initiative to New York City in 1988.
The artists created photo-documentation, zines, doco-like Super 8mm artworks and site-specific exhibitions (such as at the 2B Garage in the East Village). The title was a conceptual provocation—and a constructive one, as a nod to the romanticised, mythologised status that the global art hub of New York had in the minds of “emerging” Australian artists working in the conservative political climate of 1980s Queensland.The legacy and archives of this multimodal project were recently revisited and exhibited at venues like the BARI Festival and the Epicormia Collective in 2016, and the Soylent Spot in 2017-18. You can read more about their guerrilla tactics, including creative archival assemblages as zines, eccentric archival installations and exhibitions here on the expanded and expanding ARI Remix digital archive internet artwork.