Join us for a discussion and presentation of deposition, a project by Marissa Lee Benedict, Daniel de Paula, and David Rueter centered on the displacement, exhibition, and reprogramming of a large-scale trading pit, salvaged from the grain room of the Chicago Board of Trade. In 2021, the obsolete seven-tier commodity trading pit floor was relocated to the center of Oscar Niemeyer’s Ciccillo Matarazzo for the 2021 São Paulo Biennial with support from a grant from the Graham Foundation.  Benedict, de Paula, and Rueter will be joined by Karsten Lund, editor of their new book from Mousse Publishing that documents the project. Copies will be available for purchase in the Graham Foundation bookshop following the discussion.

About the publication:
Proceeding from the iconic installation deposition (2018–ongoing) by artists Marissa Lee Benedict, Daniel de Paula, and David Rueter in the central atrium of Oscar Niemeyer’s pavilion for the 34th Bienal de São Paulo, this volume traces the salvage, displacement, and exhibition of the last corn commodities futures trading pit from the Chicago Board of Trade. Essays and interviews provide divergent lenses from which to view the work, moving from intimate to distant, scanning over the object, the artists, the art institution, and the architectures of the geopolitical landscape in which these elements operate. Section by section, the book works through the multiple, and compacted, meanings of the word “deposition” (geologic, legal, art historical), layering images and texts to build concrete yet non-linear relations, as the 32 fragments of the former trading floor are dragged from Chicago to São Paulo.

deposition (Mousse Publishing, 2023) features the work of Marissa Lee Benedict, David Rueter, Daniel De Paula, and is edited by Karsten Lund with text by Yamila Goldfarb, Cameron Hu, and Ana Teixeira Pinto.

Daniel de Paula is a Brazilian visual artist and researcher. de Paula has been awarded the Mondriaan Funds Proven Talent Award and has exhibited widely at institutions such as MASP, São Paulo; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan; Kunsthal Gent; The Arts Club of Chicago; Estação Pinacoteca, São Paulo; and the 2022 Lyon Biennale. His work is represented by Francesca Minini Gallery and Lumen Travo Gallery, and has been reviewed in Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art, Mousse Magazine, Folha de São Paulo, and Het Parool. He has participated in several international artistic residencies such as the Jan van Eyck Academie, FLACC, and KIOSKO.

Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter are visual artists, writers, and researchers working in collaboration since 2014. Benedict and Rueter have exhibited works at The US Pavilion for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale; The Arts Club of Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; and Contemporary Art Brussels, amongst others. They have received major grants from institutions such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Their work has been reviewed by publications such as Artforum, Revista, Agenda Magazine, and Hyperallergic. They have collaboratively participated in numerous international artistic residencies including Rupert, the Banff Centre, and the Jan van Eyck Academie.

It was at the Jan van Eyck Academie in 2018 that Benedict, de Paula and Rueter began their collaborative work deposition (2018–ongoing) with the salvage of the last remaining commodities trading pit from the Chicago Board of Trade. Their work has been awarded individual grant support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and has been exhibited at the 34th Bienal de São Paulo, The Arts Club of Chicago, and The Renaissance Society.

Karsten Lund is curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, where he organizes exhibitions, edits publications, and oversees public programs. His most recent exhibitions include new commissions by Haig Aivazian (2021), Jill Magid (2021), Matthew Metzger (2021), and LaToya Ruby Frazier (2019, cocurated with Solveig Øvstebø), as well as group shows such as Nine Lives (2020, with Caroline Picard) and Unthought Environments (2018). His latest group exhibition, Fear of Property (2022), features new work by Benedict, de Paula and Rueter, an off-shoot of deposition (2018-ongoing), and he has acted as editor for a monograph on the work (of the same name) that is being released in 2023 by Mousse Publishing. As an editor, Lund works on three to four books every year at the Renaissance Society, including recent titles by Kevin Beasley and Jill Magid. He has also independently edited volumes such as the Graham Foundation-supported Spells by Irena Haiduk (Sternberg Press, 2015).

Image: Installation view, deposition, 34th Bienal de São Paulo, 2021. Photo: Everton Ballardin