By Gavin Wade

3in1 is a variable art-production structure developed by Per Hüttner and myself over the last couple of years. We were interested in pursuing ideas from different vantage points, and discussed and tweaked ideas of how to follow through other artists ideas within a circuit of production which could lead to personal and group development. The 3in1 circuit was completed when we invited Goshka Macuga to be the third protagonist within an exhibition at Nylon Gallery. We stripped the idea down to the basics of each artist/curator providing a written proposal for an artwork which they would produce and which would also be produced by the other two. This would lead to three versions of three ideas, potentially allowing comparison and evaluation of the artworks and the entire procedure. For me the opportunity to expand and adapt my personal vocabulary and practice as an artist or as a curator has always been at the heart of the 3in1 project.

So the three of us are artist/curators from three different countries: UK, Sweden and Poland. But we all know London pretty well. Per runs a gallery in Stockholm called Konstakuten and has lived in the UK on and off, and Goshka has lived here for quite a few years now: so what is internationalism anyway? 3in1 is part four of a series called 'Curatorial Mutiny' instigated by Konstakuten and has seen an international focus of exchange and collaboration from the start. Parts one and two were at Konstakuten in February and April 2000 and Part three was at Or Gallery, Vancouver, October 2000. 3in1 is a natural coming together of ideas; a curatorial exchange of knowledge through practice. The project made me realise how different our backgrounds and ideas are, and I hope that this becomes a strength of the project. The three proposals are quite far apart with Goshka proposing to build an iceberg, Per to visualise/problematise the relationship between fitness and macro-politics, and my proposal is to develop a new support structure for Brancusi's sculptures.

I still don't really know why I would want to make an iceberg and so this presents the first problem. Perhaps I haven't fulfilled Goshka's proposal with my own iceberg, which ended up focussing on the layers of history that an iceberg might represent. Six invited artists plus myself each built a layer of an iceberg which all stacked up on top of each other to form a complete iceberg. This was, of course, a curatorial option and was given real substance by Gary Webb, Mark Titchner, Hobbypop, Anya Gallaccio, Lolly Batty and Tommy Stockel. Still, what we were left with was a strange hybrid concoction standing in for an iceberg rather than representing one.

Per's idea seemed extremely difficult so I became interested in pursuing it to the most impossible degree and developed a notion of fitness not of the body but of art and government. How fit are we to govern or to make art? Or how much of the human potential has been achieved through art or government? I thought I'd produce a graph showing this use of human potential over the last seven thousand years and speculate a thousand years into the future just for good measure. So I produced a wall painting twenty-six metres long beginning at 5000BC and ending at 3000AD. This project made me realise how difficult it is to consider or locate the effect of art or even the effect of government over time. Mostly it pushed me to begin considering my lack of historical knowledge in both areas.

Personally I think we should develop a self and group evaluation strategy for any further development of the project which becomes part of the exhibition design. We are hoping to develop the next stage, 3in1x2, for a New York gallery, where we will each invite an artist based in the States. The artist invited by me will work with Goshka and Per's ideas and so on. This progression with new artists in an unfamiliar place could lead to a new awareness of how to achieve results and follow through with new stimuli. This aspect of the project is what excites me: that we are in training; honing our skills in anticipation of a job for art to do.

GAVIN WADE IS AN ARTIST AND CURATOR BASED IN LONDON AND RESEARCH FELLOW IN CURATING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WOLVERHAMPTON. 3in1 was at Nylon Gallery, London, 22 March—29 April.

By Aleksandra Mir

'HELLO' is a photographic daisy chain, linking people with others they have met in varying circumstances, across a wide geographic, historic and social spectrum. The images form an unbroken chain of human encounters where each new image offers an answer to the preceding one and poses a problem to the next, and each link adds a new subtexts to the whole.

Relations in the work are defined by physical proximity (family&friends), desire (fans&lovers) and identification (impersonators&fakes), as well as subversions on the theme. Already, there are 'fictional' characters such as The Muppets involved.

The principle of construction is simple. In every picture, people appear in pairs and each person appears twice only, in two different photographs, with two different people. This, of course, is a pretty limited—even corrupt -depiction of anyone's life history. The two pictures I have of Brigitte Bardot for example, show her as a fresh undiscovered teen at her family breakfast table, and as an old woman covering her face at Roger Vadim's funeral(with another ex-wife, Jane Fonda). So her career as a star and sex symbol is completely bypassed.

Each new exhibition contexts presents the work with a new format and configuration. To operate, no less than ten pictures are needed to form a startling sequence, but the work process as such extends infinitely. It can wrap around and function as a portrait of one individual, a family, a country and/or ultimately the whole photographed population on earth.

First shown at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in June 2000, 'HELLO' consisted of sixty-five pictures. In February 2001, it was shown at the Barbican, London, where 333 pictures lined the Curve Gallery. Shortly, it will be cut by half to fit a descending ramp at Trapholt Art Museum in Denmark, can be reduced to only six for my mother's hallway, and so on.

Besides calling on my personal relations to contribute photos from private albums, my resources range from public photographic archives to corporate PR departments. I have used material from the collections of the Smithsonian, NYC Historical Society, Museum of Chinese in the Americas, and All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, Wimbledon. I have also formed sponsorship relationships with several commercial archives such as Allsport, Newsmakers and Hulton Getty Archive, that hold over a century of photography, over twenty-million images and skilled research staff to assist. Yet, despite this abundance, each archive still comes with its own demography and the challenge is eventually to breach that, to find the most unexpected combination. An unpublished photo of Brazil's King of Rock, Roberto Carlos, posing in a park with Pele on guitar, just arrived in my mailbox after a hundred phone calls and months of research.

'HELLO' is a populist piece of art, made with, of and for the public. People seem to enjoy it as it openly invites them to participate by adding their own references to it. Inevitably, the most satisfactory reactions seem to be those where people can pinpoint 'mistakes' to the seemingly logical flow. Where one viewer evidently did not agree with the identification of a person depicted, he smartly scribbled his comments on the label, added a name, crossing the original out. If this viewer is right, the work instantly 'fails' upon itself and reveals the extreme conditions of its making, as well as the vulnerability of any narration of history—You can only do so much as to rely on your sources.

Aleksandra Mir is an artist based in New York.
She is currently on a residency at Delfina Studio Trust in London.