kurimanzutto is pleased to present por favor gracias de nada (please thank you your welcome) the most recent collaboration between Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri and British artist Liam Gillick. The exhibition will be held in a shop in the Condesa neighborhood that has been taken over for the project.

This exhibition is the result of an ongoing dialogue between the artists and provides an opportunity to witness the overlaps and resonances within their work. Kuri continues to work with the usual systems: constructing oppositions that operate together while systematically serve to cancel each other out. Thank you, no thank you (at present a nickname rather than a title for this new work), is a continuation of Kuri’s most recent practice and consists of two separate groupings of collected plastic shopping bags, each attached to and inflated by a pivoting fan. Kuri has choreographed the movement between the two to allow them to meet and miss at different points on their journey.

Kuri’s second work finds items of his clothing –dry-cleaned, pressed, and preserved by their protective plastic sleeves– in a refrigerator. The dichotomy created by Kuri’s clashing plastic bags is a device repeated in this work, but this time he acknowledges the cyclical processes of heating and chilling ––possible metaphors for recurring moments, actions, and events which do not normally or necessarily overlap.

Gillick has created two new works for the exhibition, Discussion Corral and Liquid Renovation, which develop the rhetoric behind his Think Tanks, Platforms, and Screens --gridded structures made from brightly coloured Plexiglas and aluminium. Operating somewhere between architecture, design, and sculpture, these works ask us to negotiate space, thereby creating the potential for new unexpected social encounters.

Gillick’s new works are more open structures than his recent works, and abandon the use of multi-coloured Plexiglas. Instead they favour the painting of the gridded aluminium frame, leaving a more permeable structure, which can also be entered from one side.

Both artists are interested in systems of operation and offer arbitrary spaces for discussion that are often deliberately confused, pushing us to reassess the social space we inhabit. While the systems used in Gillick’s case exist, like his texts, substantially in parallel structures, in Kuri’s case they are concealed within the object and search slightly beyond their materiality for their meaning. While each artist has produced separate works for this exhibition, they will collaborate on a site-specific work that draws on both their practices and recognizes the siting of the exhibition in this unconventional and short-lived setting.

The artists first collaborated in 1996 with the project Everyday Holiday at Le Magasin in Grenoble; in it they created a yearly calendar of events and special occasions based on sequential but altering local customs, calendar of saints' days celebrations and commemorations. They also worked together with others on the exhibition Dedalic Convention at MAK in Vienna (2001), a hypothetical convention that examined modes of improvisation. Kuri was also designated one of the supervisors for The Trial of Pol Pot (1998), a Phillippe Parreno and Liam Gillick project at Le Magasin, which assessed the tangible and the mythical within the enigmas behind this architect of genocide.