Dec 2-Dec 6,2015

Produced in collaboration with The Bass for the fifth consecutive year, twenty-six international artists transformed Collins Park with 27 site-specific installations for Art Basel Miami Beach Public’s Metaforms.

Nicholas Baume, Director and Chief Curator of Public Art Fund, returned for his third year curating Public. Metaforms presents 27 large-scale and site-specific installations and performances by leading and emerging artists from over 11 countries, including Olaf Breuning, James Capper, Tony Cragg, Melvin Edwards, Sam Falls, Sylvie Fleury, Katharina Grosse, Matt Johnson, Jacob Kassay, Kris Martin, Rubén Ortiz Torres, Athena Papadopoulos, Ishmael Randall-Weeks, Sterling Ruby, Michael Sailstorfer, Tomás Saraceno, Tony Tasset, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Francisco Ugarte, Timm Ulrichs, Marianne Vitale, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Hank Willis Thomas, Robert Wilson, Yan Xing and Xiao Yu.

Nicholas Baume’s curatorial premise, Metaforms, considers how art making is, at its core, a process of transformation. The presentation explores manners in which artists conceptually and physically reimagine objects or symbols and, in doing so, add new layers of significance to what were once familiar in order to reveal unexpected truths.

A selection of artworks from Metaforms remain in Collins Park through February 1, 2016 as part of The Bass Projects, in partnership with the City of Miami Beach.

A series of live performances accompanied Public on Wednesday, December 2, 2015. Xavier Cha’s supreme ultimate exercise (2015) is comprised of parallel performances contrasting manipulations of the athletic form, including both the slow, controlled and fluid movements of a female tai chi master adjacent to a choreographed tractor tire routine enacted by male bodybuilders. Controlled physical exertion also marks Pope.L’s elaborate and sorrowful production; four large men speed through the park on skateboards, while lying prone, before crawling laboriously onto a small wooden stage to sing America The Beautiful. Channeling the Wildean pun of ‘the earnest Ernest’, Ryan Gander’s work features a dandy hobo who engages the audience in scripted conversations that reveal iterations of the artist’s fancied and conflicted selves. The work, Ernest Hawker (2015), was a Performa Commission curated by Mark Beasley for Performa 15. Public’s opening night also featured a special evening rendition of Yan Xing’s flirtatious performance.