Ser Serpas Livres

Carman is based on chronological iPhone notes that Ser Serpas wrote during her undergraduate studies, from July 2013 to July 2017. The title Carman not only evokes Carmen, Georges Bizet’s famous opera of love and seduction; it is also the name of Serpas’s freshman-year dormitory at Columbia, where she majored in the fine arts and urban studies. Originally from Los Angeles, she is now based in New York. The poems she wrote in her final year at Columbia led to the exhibition You were created to be so young (self-harm and exercise) in the summer of 2018 at Luma Westbau. Serpas’s experience in community work and the fashion industry fed into the exploitation of her own and others’ detritus. As Hannah Black notes in “Becoming Trash,” her poetry in Carman is a “mythic account of her development as an artist.”

By the Highway In By the Highway, Ser Serpas walks through Paris with Rafik Greiss, seeking out the sites that shape her sculptures and installations. In dialogue with Dora Budor, this volume in the KONTEXT series presents new approaches to form, volume, and materiality as well as how Serpas's method updates the tradition of readymades. Whether she is working with discarded trash or hoarded things, Serpas (b. Los Angeles, 1995, lives and works between Los Angeles and Paris) manipulates these materials to create art in ways that complicate our perception of value and inscribe meaning into what would otherwise be trash. Serpas often brings her sculptures back to the street after the exhibition, letting them become trash while playing with what is allowed inside and outside the museum. In his work, the Egyptian artist Rafik Greiss (b. Dublin, 1997; lives and works in Paris) captures matter in a state oscillating between representational image and factual substance. His photographs are less about specific objects and more about examining these objects in their own lives and how they react with each other. The artist and author Dora Budor (b. Zagreb, 1984; lives and works in New York) contributes an essay to this volume, which examines Serpas's work in relation to the processes of accumulation, obsolescence and scavenging, as well as deriving from their historical precedents; assisted readymades, scatter pieces and combines.