From 21 December, Tate Modern will become host to The Wrong Gallery, a tiny exhibition space conceived and directed by the internationally renowned Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan and curators Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick. The Wrong Gallery has an exhibition space of approximately one metre square, which can be seen through a locked single glass door. As The Wrong curators say, ‘The Wrong Gallery is the back door to contemporary art, and it’s always locked’.
The first artist selected to create a work for this gallery at Tate Modern is Berlin-based Dorothy Iannone (b. Boston, USA, 1933), who has made artworks since the 1960s celebrating erotic love. Iannone will create a work based on I Was Thinking of You, her first video box made in 1975, which shows her face while she is masturbating. The artist will include the original video, framed in a new ‘orgasm’ box, decorated with highly colourful and detailed patterns which act as a background to two central figures of a naked man and woman.
Much of Iannone’s work is autobiographical, influenced by her travels in India, Japan and South East Asia, and relates to her relationship with the artist Dieter Roth. At various times throughout her career, her work has been censored or simply neglected. As the artist herself has stated, ‘There are other forms of censorship besides confiscation. To ignore work is a subtle and very effective form of censorship’. Iannone’s work will be shown in the gallery until the end of February 2006.
Until recently The Wrong Gallery was sandwiched between two doors on 20th St, Chelsea, New York since 2002. In September 2005, the gallery was evicted from this site, and the original door is being relocated to Tate Modern. The Wrong Galley in New York has hosted over forty projects by a range of artists, including Tomma Abts, Pawel Althamer, Phil Collins, Martin Creed, Sam Durant, Mark Handsforth, Cameron Jamie, Paul McCarthy & Jason Rhoades, Elizabeth Peyton, Paola Pivi, Tino Sehgal, Shirana Shahbazi and more. A newspaper called The Wrong Times is published once a year and features interviews with all of the artists presented at The Wrong Gallery.
Ann Coxon, Assistant Curator, Displays, Tate Modern will be acting as organiser for the gallery and the programme in collaboration with Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick. There will be around six displays per year in The Wrong Gallery, which will be situated on level 3, Tate Modern, within the changing Tate Collection displays due to be completed in May 2006.
Included in the January edition of TATE ETC there will be a special extra magazine project by The Wrong Gallery produced to coincide with this new gallery at Tate Modern.