X-initiative's No Soul For Sale: A Festival of Independents opens tonight at 6pm. The festival is free and open to the public, runs until June 28th, and will be open everyday from 1-9pm. For the festival, X-initiative invited over 30 separate non-profit arts organizations, alternative institutions, and artists' collectives from all over the world to take over the space at 548 West 22nd Street in New York with performances, screenings, exhibitions, lectures and more.
Rhizome is pleased to be one of the invitees this year, and for the festival staff members Lauren Cornell, Brian Droitcour and Ceci Moss curated an exhibition entitled "The World Is Flat". Located on the second floor of the 548 West 22nd Street space, the show will bring together a selection of works that engage the free availability and distribution of information enabled by the Internet. Featured artists and collectives include B'L'ing (Chris Moukarbel, Anne Eastman, Amy Yao), Anna Lundh, Oliver Laric, Lizzie Fitch, Alexandre Singh and David Horvitz. Two artist-centered publications, Private Circulation and Free Internet by AIDS-3D, will be on display as well. An event with artist Anna Lundh is also scheduled on Saturday June 27th from 2-3pm on the first floor. Lundh will conduct a workshop/performance based around her work HEXA_FLEXAGON_F_EVER (2008) that will walk participants through the process of hexaflexagon construction and present a short history of the hexaflexagons in the form of a corporate seminar. If you live in New York, come by and visit. For those who can't make it, we will be blogging from the festival all this week, conducting mini-interviews with fellow exhibitors and snapping shots of all the activity.