Cauleen Smith, COVID MANIFESTO

In November 2020, one of America’s leading artists Cauleen Smith presented her ‘COVID MANIFESTO’ curated in collaboration with The Showroom, London on the Piccadilly Lights giant screen. Smith rewrote and revealed each point of the Manifesto throughout the duration of November. In a sort of ‘living’ still life, the artist’s desk became the tableau, in which personal items, remnants of daily rituals, and key references to her practice accumulated, appeared and disappeared. ‘COVID MANIFESTO‘ consisted of 23 pronouncements. The project unfolded in a sequence, a crescendo, that was punctuated by 7 intermissions selected from Smith’s existing works. Over the month, the personal and poetic, the eventful and now historical featured as Smith responded to COVID-19 and its multiple aftermaths.

Cauleen Smith (born 1967) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, she makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants.