Elizabeth Dee proudly presents The Probable Trust Registry, a new installation and participatory group performance by Adrian Piper. Piper’s work stages an environment for the potential of collective exchange in the form of personal declarations that become part of an enduring and ongoing artwork.

For this exhibition, the main gallery is transformed into three corporate reception environments drawn from universal work culture. Each reception area is fully staffed by a volunteer administrator who helps to execute personal declaration contracts to a self-selecting public. Above each reception desk exists a different personal declaration affixed in gold to the stereotypical grey walls. These “Rules of the Game” are mirrored in the corresponding contract on the desk, each desk/contract respectively with one of the three rules:

I will always be too expensive to buy

I will always mean what I say

I will always do what I say I am going to do

Engagement with Piper’s interactive installation offers the possibility to assess one’s own philosophical obligations and to reevaluate complicit relationships to others. The Rules of the Game is an introspective catalyst to personally audit the question of the declaration’s potential for success or failure on both a personal and collective level. Piper’s new installation engages the public with sharp clarity and perception.

Signatories that sign the Personal Declarations will assist to participate in an ongoing artwork by Adrian Piper and have the option to contact one another if mutually agreed. Following the close of the exhibition, the gallery will send The Probable Trust Registry consisting in bound photocopies of all personal declarations filed in The Rules of the Game to all and only its signatories. These documents become part of the APRA Foundation Berlin confidential inventory and are sealed to the public for 100 years following the closing date of the exhibition.

Since the late 1960s, Adrian Piper has forged a unique artistic practice that infused classical Minimal sculptural form with explicit political content and introduced issues of race, gender and identity politics into the vocabulary of Conceptual art. She has deployed performance, permutation and seriation—which at the time that Piper began using them were considered non-traditional artistic media—as strategies for investigating the infinite variability of perceptual form and content. In recent years, her artwork has begun to intersect more explicitly with her philosophical work, resulting in a reconsideration of space, time, and infinity in defining the limits and potential permutability of the self as situated on a pre-established grid defined by social and political variables of race, sex, class conflict, and social relations.

This is Adrian Piper’s third solo exhibition with Elizabeth Dee, following the acclaimed 2010 historical exhibition, Past Time: Selected works 1973-1995, which honored Piper with the CAA (College Art Association) Award. She has shown extensively for the past five decades in solo and group contexts and has been the subject of numerous survey exhibitions including Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2003); Generali Foundation, Vienna (2002); New Museum, New York (2000); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2000); Kunstverein München, Munich (1992); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England (1991); and Alternative Museum, New York (1987).

A forthcoming monograph published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. will feature essays by Diarmuid Costello, Helmut Draxler, and Jörg Heiser in 2015.