About the project
OFFSHOREART.CO is a research platform that thinks through offshore economies as a way of understanding global infrastructures and the narratives that support them. Frequently a privileged structure of ‘otherness’, offshore can speak to an independent legal, political zone or outlying subsidiary of the state that addresses deficiencies in centres of power. Our work exists between the world of academia and art. We use the platform as a means to develop and share our research. It began out of a dissatisfaction with the irresponsible way that art discourse engaged with finance. We advocate for a pragmatic representation of finance in art, while using the exceptionalism and obscurity of the art world to do research that would not be possible in other disciplines.
Our projects are iterative studies based on specific regions, which map the processes and players that use and make these systems. In New York, we focused on art’s relationship to the offshore. In Singapore, we studied the Freeport and interrogated its role in developing infrastructure and what it could tell us about private and public sector collaborations across jurisdictions. Our projects are developed through reading groups, conferences and exhibitions, which we have used as productive ways to reach out and influence individuals in the private sector, government and the arts. Our primary goals are to influence communities and eventually policy. We hope to use the offshore to build sustainable art ecologies that are generative and not exploitative between the different hemispheric orders. Our current research maps the neocolonial impulse of media discourse through FATCA, an American policy that has created an unprecedented network of international surveillance in 100 nations.
External links
About the artist
Offshoreart.co was developed as a platform at CCS Bard. We include two curators and an artist-information architect. We work collaboratively embedding our project in others and parasitically using art infrastructure like the artist residency, or fellowships like Berlin Biennale, projects like DISCREET or professional platforms like peer-reviewed journals and business magazine reviews to do research and promote our knowledge and method of long term discourse and ecological reform.
