FREE ALBA!
A series of large-scale photographs by Eduardo Kac commissioned by Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, from Dec. 8, 2001 to January 6, 2002.

Throughout 2000, news of Eduardo Kac's artwork "GFP Bunny" (2000) started to appear on the front page of newspapers such as Le Monde and Boston Globe. "GFP Bunny" is a transgenic artwork comprised of the creation of a green fluorescent rabbit, the public dialogue generated by the project, and the social integration of the rabbit. Sharing headlines alongside articles about the 2000 Olympics and US presidential debates, Kac's "GFP Bunny" story was appropriated by news organizations worldwide, often generating new narratives that, both intentionally and unintentionally, reinstated or overlooked the facts. In the "Free Alba!" (2001) series of photographs, Kac reappropriates some of these stories and recontextualizes them, exhibiting the productive tension that is generated when contemporary art enters the realm of daily news. If in the 1960s artists purchased space in newspapers in order to intervene in the media, today an artist such as Eduardo Kac creates a work with such unique presence in the physical world that the global news media features the work and discussions about it. While "GFP Bunny" was also prominently featured on international television, radio and magazines, for "Free Alba!" Kac focuses on newspapers as a medium that presents multiple stories simultaneoulsy, thus contextualizing one in relation to the other. The photographs in this series dramatize the fact that the reception of "GFP Bunny" was equally complex, taking place across cultures and in diverse locations.

The "Free Alba!" series is part of a city-wide public art project that presents artworks inside large shipping containers scattered throughout the city of Kaohsiung. Kac's "Free Alba!" flag is seen flying on top of the artist's container. In addition, the installation includes a series of "GFP Bunny-Paris Intervention" posters which were posted by Kac all over Paris in 2000. The posters have been previously shown in galleries and museums in New York, Germany and Seattle.

Eduardo Kac, "Free Alba!" (2001)

Photo: Anna Yu

Click on the image above to see more photographs of the installation.


For additional information, please contact: Julia Friedman at (312) 455-0755 (voice), 312-455-0765 (fax), or info@juliafriedman.com.

For information about Eduardo Kac's work in Chinese, please see: http://arts.cn.tom.com/zhuanti/1112_05/index.html (Hong Kong) or http://www.ekac.org/chinese1.html (USA).


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