Zak Kyes at the ICA, 8 - 27 March 2010

COSEY COMPLEX
And THE COSEY COMPLEX READER

Zak Kyes is an extremely talented young graphic designer, living and working in the UK – luckily for the SCFB Zak is in fact partly Swiss! The ICA is an institution that prides itself on its innovativeness and ability to adapt to the moment in every sense – focusing very much on new art forms, and thus giving them a professional platform besides the more conventional programming. Combining the two makes the utmost sense and the SCFB is glad to have been able to support the artist as well as the venue. In a context that is a rather exciting one, the Cosey Complex was conceived by art writer Maria Fusco. The project incorporated a one-day event and a sequence of printed material, all of which used as their starting point the identity of artist and musician Cosey Fanni Tutti. Fusco invited a range of practitioners to contribute, with the initial brief to consider ‘Cosey as methodology’.
Zak Kyes’s response to the brief took the form of discursive intervention and a three-week public residency, in collaboration with Bedford Press at the ICA, where Kyes and other contributors edited, designed and printed on site a Cosey Complex Reader. Opening up and displaying the normally closed editorial, curatorial and research processes related directly to Cosey Fanni Tutti’s insertion of herself into magazines in the 1970s and 80s, appropriating an existing form of distribution.