IUNO and the American Academy in Rome are proud to present CONTINUITY MUTABILITY GENERATION, a collaborative exhibition by Zachary Fabri and Emily B. Frank (2024 Fellows), which considers the generative interplay of art making and art conservation.

Fabri and Frank present an exhibition that displays the collaborative relay in their iterative process and challenges the boundaries of their respective disciplines. They are concerned with how ideas move (and have continuity) and change (and are mutable) through (a generative process of) art making and conservation. A vital element of their collaboration is exploring the way that these two practices bleed into each other as modes of telling stories and conveying ideas.

Organized chronologically by iteration, the exhibition reveals the processual continuity and mutability of their ideas in materials. From the initial seed artwork to the final installation, visitors will experience how conservation and art making are intertwined and blur traditionally conceived boundaries, shaping and reshaping the narrative along the way.

Concerns and questions that are woven into the collaborative exhibition include:

• The ways that art making can be conceived of as a kind of conservation
• The ways that conservation practice can be understood to generate art
• How definitions limit the way conservation and art are distinguished
• How narrative is an essential part of how materials are harnessed in both artistic and conservation outputs

Fabri and Frank will have a public conversation, titled “On Art and Conservation,” on April 24, 2024 at 6:00pm at IUNO, in which they will consider the show and explore its wider ideas and implications.

About the Artists

Zachary Fabri is an interdisciplinary artist working across video, drawing, and installation, often complicating the boundaries of studio research and performance. He has received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Franklin Furnace FUND for Performance Art, a New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship, and BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize. Fabri’s work has shown his work at Art in General, the Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, the Walker Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, Performa, and the Ludwig Museum in Budapest. Collaborative projects include the Museum of Modern Art, the Sharjah Biennial, and Pace Gallery. Recent solo exhibitions were held at CUE Art Foundation in New York, the Nicholson Project in Washington, DC, and the Recovery Plan in Florence.

Emily B. Frank is an objects and sculpture conservator interested in the ways that conservation can contribute to our understanding of the ancient and contemporary world. Frank is the recipient of the 2024 Suzanne Deal Booth Rome Prize in Historic Preservation and Conservation at the American Academy in Rome. Based in New York City, Frank works in conservation at EBFC and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. This project builds on themes and questions at the core of her work in conservation, which include:

• creative approaches to the documentation of works of art

• working with artists and fabricators prior to the completion of artworks

• the role of conservation in defining/articulating the narratives that objects represent and help construct (which are neither uniform nor stable)

• the parallels between conservation and translation practices

IUNO is a research center on contemporary art founded by Ilaria Gianni and Cecilia Canziani with the collaboration of Giulia Gaibisso. Since opening in December 2021, IUNO has hosted a program of exhibitions, seminars, residencies, and workshops. IUNO is interested in processes rather than projects and disorganizes knowledge. Exhibitions, seminars, performance courses, educational programs, and editorial formats are the tools through which it seeks a nonsystematic and convivial approach to artistic production and its theoretical debate.