Immovable Properties
William Wiebe

A building is often constructed by one party, owned by another, and rented by a third; in this case the space in question is on loan. The borrower has a professional status and a legal status and has resided under two national jurisdictions in the past year, both of which are implicated as unfixed entities and progenitors of policies whose imprecision oftentimes yields absurd outcomes. An artist and a citizen, the borrower has produced a series of works in collaboration with the regulatory bodies that incentivise the construction of buildings, with the organisations that maintain those buildings, with the administration that regulates them both, and with individuals petitioning for their recognition–namely, aliens of extraordinary ability and an as-yet-unidentified alien investor.

Immovable Properties finds William Wiebe at work on the border. This exhibition will include works made in Cyprus, works made in the US, and works made in the constitutive outside. There will be sculpture, photographs, and quite a few things that might not look like they belong. The earliest works are a group of construction tools and materials purchased by the artist in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, that became artworks in the trunk of his car as it crossed the green line that demarcates the eastern extent of the European Union’s jurisprudence. More recent works similarly attend to legal loopholes, tax exemptions, bureaucratic mechanisms and their erratic implementation.

About the Artist
William Wiebe holds a BA from Wesleyan University (2014) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2018). From 2018-2019, Wiebe was a US Fulbright Fellow in Cyprus. He is currently a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program.

For more about William, visit him online at https://williamcwiebe.com/

Immovable Properties is curated by Daisy Charles.