_{Installation view: Ken Friedman: 92 Events, 08 Dec 2023 - 28 Mar 2024. Photo: Stephen Cleland}

92 Events presents works spanning six decades by American born Fluxus artist Ken Friedman, who since 2014 has lived and worked in Kalmar, Sweden. Friedman produces conceptual, action-oriented, language-based works that attach themselves to daily life and challenge the idea of an artwork as a unique object.

Presented as a commanding suite of paradoxically humble A4 prints, Friedman’s texts navigate a fine line between sculptural proposition, absurdist action, and concrete poetry. His works are deliberately playful—absurd even—and describe a series of actions that break with traditional notions of art, leaving their actual realisation in the hands or minds of the viewer. In this sense Friedman’s scores are live documents. By operating in language as instructions, descriptions, and documents, they slip between past, present, and future, operating in a suspended state of possibility with endless potential for variation and interpretation.

Throughout the run of the exhibition Wai Ngutu Kākā is inviting a range of practitioners to respond to Friedman’s texts. Continue to visit our website and subscribe to our social channels for the most up to date information on upcoming events and new additions to the show.

This exhibition has been realised in partnership with Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery.

_{Ken Friedman (1949, New London Connecticut) joined Fluxus in 1966 and was the youngest member of the group. He subsequently worked closely with artists and composers associated with Fluxus such as Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, John Cage and others. He was instrumental in establishing Fluxus West which was designed as a gathering point for Fluxus-related activities in the western states of America, but also extended its reach to Germany and the UK in the late 1960s and 1970s. In 1971 he participated in New Zealand post-object artist and composer Philip Dadson’s Earthworks a ‘composition’ for film and audiotape realised simultaneously at fifteen locations across the globe. In the 1990s, Friedman’s work as a management consultant and designer led him to an academic career, first as Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design at the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo, then as Dean of the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. Friedman is currently a University Distinguished Professor at Swinburne and Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies at Tongji University.}

Ken Friedman: 92 Events Exhibition Guide