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JON RUBIN: The Survival Studies Institute

JON RUBIN
The Survival Studies Institute
May 5 – October 15, 2023

Home to the Peterson Space Force Base, Schriever Space Force Base, Cheyenne Mountain Space Force Station, U.S. Space Command, and Space Operations Command— Colorado Springs has the largest contingent of space service military installations in the world. Given this reality on the ground and in space, the Survival Studies Institute posits a series of propositions about what the future holds for the property at 1010 N. Logan Avenue, Colorado Springs, U.S.

Jon Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist who creates interventions into public life that re-imagine individual, group, and institutional behavior. Rubin’s best-known projects include Conflict Kitchen, a take-out restaurant that served dishes from countries deemed hostile or antagonistic by the United States. He also created The Last Billboard, which ran thoughtful and provocative messages on a rooftop on a busy street corner in downtown Pittsburgh. For the Shanghai Biennial, he transported the entire contents of a family’s estate sale from Pittsburgh to Shanghai, and recreated it exactly as it was for sale to be sold to people in China. Other projects include starting a radio station in an abandoned neighborhood that only plays the sound of an extinct bird, and running a barter-based nomadic art school, among many others that transport objects and cultural practices into radically different contexts, working with the frisson that the ensuing juxtaposition creates

Rubin has exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Mercosul Biennial; the Shanghai Biennial; the Carnegie International, The Lyon Biennale; the Solomon Guggenheim Museum; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard; The Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico; The Rooseum, Sweden; Sazmanab, Tehran, Iran; as well as in backyards, living rooms, and street corners. Rubin is a Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.