Mixed Greens is pleased to announce its participation in the ambitious, four-venue group exhibition, Multiplicity, where the cities of Belfast, Hong Kong, New Delhi, New York, Tel Aviv, Tirana, and beyond are explored as subject and matter.

Multiplicity is an international survey of artworks sharing an interest in the politics and poetic potential of contemporary urban environments, while also exposing the irresistible pull of intercultural meeting points, common problems, goals, and dreams around which people converge. Curated by Marco Antonini in collaboration with a network of curatorial advisors, Multiplicity is presented as a series of four consecutive and partially overlapping exhibitions (see above), featuring a wide selection of works that explore culturally and geographically distant urban spaces. The works address the myriad public and private rituals of the cities, mining their institutional and vernacular histories while reimagining their formal and functional aspects.

Cities unite by bringing people together; sometimes they divide for exactly the same reason. They are both abstract ideas and physical places, strategically sited to coincide with natural resources or created to materialize pure theory. A city is a place for individualism and exchange, solitude and communal living. A city’s name can engender ideals, both successful and failed, rising to represent something beyond its own history and present/future tensions and aspirations—a total larger than the sum of its parts.

Cities contain multitudes that, as powerful and creative collective entities, give life to the multiplicity that we have identified as the core value of every urban community. This force induces daily struggles and concerns, dreams as solid as concrete pillars, yet soft as grey matter: resources as infinite and unresolved as the human mind. Such resources can be either investigated and addressed as a whole or broken down to independent ideas and images, personal concerns and local struggles that, although unique, will necessarily inform each other, presenting macroscopic similarities.

Contemporary cities are structured around largely internalized foundational ideals, inviting (or inciting) contrasting notions of what sharing, protection, tolerance, competition, access, visibility, circulation, expansion, convenience, exchange, service, profit, and productivity actually mean. This multitude of possible readings adds up to a global urban vocabulary straddling geographical and political boundaries. In this sense, Multiplicity strives to present images and ideas as different and distinctive as the urban contexts that originally inspired them, embodying the internal contradictions and boundless potential of small and large, young and old, meticulously planned and chaotically sprawling cities worldwide.

Funding for Multiplicity has been provided in part by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, British Council, and the Czech Center New York. PR support by Artis, Czech Center New York, Invisible–Exports, Mixed Greens, and UnionDocs. Refreshments provided by Lagunitas.