Screening

In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of its founding, the VLC commissioned artists Reena Katz and Paul Ramírez Jonas to “intervene” in the center’s archive and create an original art work, reflecting the center’s twenty-year history.

Hello I Am Hello I Was
Paul Ramírez Jonas’s artist project Hello I Am Hello I Was is an unlimited print edition commissioned to celebrate the Vera List Center for Art and Politics’s 20th anniversary. In addition to the public lecture Every Public Has a Form, Ramírez Jonas made name tags that are free and available at the auditorium doors of each VLC public event. The public is encouraged to take a name tag and write a name of a current or past public figure to embody as they sit as an audience member of the event. Hello I Am Hello I Was is a reflection on the transformative nature of open discourse in the public sphere.

About Paul Ramírez Jonas
Paul Ramírez Jonas is one of the most influential thinkers on public space and art, and has created participatory projects in many different countries. In 2010, his Key to the City project was presented by Creative Time in cooperation with the City of New York.

Selected solo exhibitions were featured at the Pinacoteca do Estado, Sao Paulo, Brazil; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; The Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England; Cornerhouse, Manchester, England; Alexander Gray Gallery, New York; Roger Björkholmen, Sweden; Nara Roesler Gallery, Brazil; and Postmasters Gallery, New York. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Gallery for Contemporary Art Leipzig, Germany; P.S.1, New York; The Whitechapel Gallery, England; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Künstlerhaus, Vienna; The New Museum, New York; and Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland. He has participated in the 1st Johannesburg Biennale; the 1st Seoul Biennial; the 6th Shanghai Biennial; the 28th Sao Paulo Biennial; the 53rd Venice Biennial, and the 7th Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil. Ramírez Jonas’s work has been profiled in Artforum, Zing, ARTnews, New York Times, Art in America, and other periodicals and journals. He was appointed Assistant Professor at Hunter College in 2007.

Paul Ramírez Jonas has made prints of this work available for purchase as part of the Vera List Anniversary Print Porfolio. The prints can be purchased online through Artspace