Sue Boxer at IVLAD, Monster, The Netherlands (2006)
artdesigncafé - art | 1 March 2006
Sue Boxer’s Classroom Interventions
At The Institute of Visionary Language Art Design (IVLAD)
Monster, The Netherlands
Private view 12 March 2006
Exhibition: 13 March - 12 May 2006
The Institute of Visionary Language Art Design in Monster, the Netherlands proudly presents Sue Boxer’s multi-media installation Classroom Interventions. Drawing upon her life and travels as an international English as a Foreign Language teacher, Boxer inserts the language classroom into an art space and questions learning techniques, her role as “educator-interventionist-voyeur”, occasional “EFL temptress”, and her own Anglo-exoticism.
"My art is about cultural interaction. Really s says the 27-year-old teacher-artist from Birmingham, England. For the private view, Boxer will give an art performance entitled English for Aliens: Grammar for You and Me (2006). Boxer is scheduled to teach grammar 36 hours straight, while her language lesson is beamed from our satellite dish in IVLAD’s surrounding mushroom fields into outer space. “This work is partly about CV building, for my next gig at a Korean language institute,” admits the artist.
This exhibition centres on Boxer’s biennale-bound, four-part installation Hello Hello. F*ck You! (2004). In this work, four wrap-around video projections, representing South America (Brazil), Asia (South Korea), the Middle East (Egypt) and Continental Europe (southern Spain), show groups of smiling children stalking the EFL teacher / artist on the street— while practising their minimal English learned from Hollywood movies, and aims to "represent a more authentic state of English as a global language".
Previously, the artist has exhibited in group shows in Rio, Kwangju, Alexandria, Amsterdam, and Cardiff, and she considers her EFL classroom to be "a temporary performance-installation". This is her first solo exhibition.
A 60-page catalogue surveying Sue Boxer’s art, teaching and occasional thoughts accompanies the exhibition with an introductory essay by London-based artist and leather-clad Marxist theorist, Karen Eliot.
To request press photographs and artist interviews, please contact exhibition curator and IVLAD Director, Dr Kim Min Su directly at [...]
© 2006 Kim Min Su, press release / artwork