The first work you encounter is a piece by Cheon-Pyo LEE and Zaynab IZADYAR who have been focusing on the repetition of maintenance and repair within their artistic activities. They are an artist couple who live and work in New York. During their residency in Basel in 2015, they collected and kept all their receipts for administrative purposes. Then they started organizing them into a collection under the title of Alibi of Autonomy, which was then handed over to Razmig Bediria, a writer who wrote a short fiction that traces the journey of consumption imprinted on those receipts. Alibi of Autonomy is an almanac of daily life of artists who applied for and accepted to the residency as well as a source material for a novelist who transforms it into a novella. This novella is then given back to the artists who use it to create an art piece on different media – such as image, video, and installation. Alibi of Autonomy is the record of the artists’ own autonomy, and at the same time, an alibi for any artist who must work diligently because of the public funding the project received. Using a 4.6m x 2.6m wall as a canvas, LEE and IZADYAR put up the enlarged receipts that inspired the novella. On the monitor, they play the scenes from the novella on the receipts that had already been re-produced several times on diverse media, without making a distinction between fiction and real-life events.
