FdK Actions or the People’s Polymorph
Kabir Carter’s proposed project FdK Actions or the People’s Polymorph entails a personal yet societal engagement with the automobile brand Volkswagen. Through a series of deskilled, abstracted cannibalizations of Taylorist practices, he will put both Volkswagen car parts and Volkswagen’s corporate history together improperly in order to make something else, or nothing at all.
“Through these exercises, I will examine VW’s impact on the Wirtschaftswunder, California custom car culture, artists who have used VWs in their work, and my own family’s experience with VW. Using different mediums, I will take the acronym KdF (Hitler’s name for the later VW Beetle) and invert it to FdK: Freude durch Kunstvermittlung.“
Kabir Carter intends to use various source materials to draw direct and indirect links between VW’s legacies. His source materials include but are not limted to: photographs taken by his mother showing him examining an installation the artist Ron Cooper made with children in 1974, as well as VW car parts produced by VW and third parties for custom car modification and various forms of auto racing. Kabir Carter’s working process is driven by the spirit of adaptive reuse and French philosopher Michel DeCerteau’s notion of “faire de la perruque” (“making a wig”), which describes a strategy of silent sabotage: the employee uses time on the clock and the employer’s means of production for personal pursuits.
Kabir Carter’s works encompass performance and installation, focussing on interactions between space, sound and the body. The discursive project Working Group for Sound in the Expanded Field consists of a series of workshops, lecture presentations, listening sessions and screenings, and seeks to expose concepts from various professional specializations in relation to the role of sound in daily life. His installation at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery is part of an ongoing series that are ordered by their physical shape and placement in space, and the behavior of sound in and around them. Each work consists of a distinct acoustic space or volume that is shaped by how planes or surfaces effect the propagation of sound around, within and through both surface and space.
Kabir Carter is an artist living in New York. Have a look at other projects mentioned in his portfolio at kabircarter.com.
Photos: Kabir Carter
Courtesy: Kabir Carter and RAVA Films (Working Group for Sound in the Expanded Field)