“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end” – Semisonic
Feia is proud to announce our not-quite-inaugural exhibition, Demolition Derby – a show about impermanence, trust, and the soft violence of starting over and building anew.
Set on the future site of Feia – currently a back garden and soon to be a brand new gallery space – and oriented around a soon-to-be-demolished shed, the show features works by a large and global group of artists working across media. The premise is simple and final: any artwork not collected by the time the demolition crew arrives will be placed in the shed and destroyed. There will be no storage, no after-the-fact extensions, and no carefully archived remains. The clock is ticking as this is an exhibition with a real and irreversible end point.
In that sense, Demolition Derby takes aim at the quiet assumption of permanence that underpins most exhibitions. This collection of work will not outlive this space, nor will it accumulate over time, or move from one context to the next. Instead, value is provisional, time is short, and the art is literally on the brink of destruction. On its surface, the show proposes a framework about risk that is both clear and loaded. But the risk present is not actually the kind that signals ambition or spectacle. It is instead quieter, stranger, and about showing something that may not last, while letting it live fully, then allowing it to disappear. A similar sense of precarity is thrust upon the audience, will you collect something now or witness it fall?
Some artists lean into that risk directly, while others ignore it completely. What binds the exhibition together is the condition of the works existence and the tension between making and unmaking, between presence and disappearance. The decision to participate is also a decision to surrender control over the work’s future. Demolition Derby resists the instinct to preserve, to finalize, and to wrap things in bubble wrap for later. Instead, it invites immediacy and celebrates the brief, ecstatic window in which something exists and is seen fully, and maybe for the last time.
Demolition Derby is, at its core, a show about thresholds. About what gets carried forward and what gets left behind. About space as something active, volatile, and political. The demolition, of both the shed and the art, isn’t tragic – it’s necessary. The new building has already been imagined, but before it arrives, this show clears the ground and lays the foundation. After September 13th, the show will sit quietly and unceremoniously until the shed is taken down at a date yet to be determined and at the whims of contractors. And so we mark the end of summer, the end of the shed, the end of one phase of Feia, and the messy, exhilarating start of another.