Founded in 1992, Installation Gallery has been staging one of the largest bi-national art exhibitions every two years (give or take a year…or two) along the San Diego-Tijuana border. The latest, inSite_05, is considered particularly remarkable for its conscious choice to turn away from the requisite performance or exhibition that mark artistic completion, to focus instead on the practice of “artistic strategies of intervention in everyday life”.

A core programmatic model which has remained relatively consistent from one inSite staging to the next, the collaboration artists undertake with a community, truly differs from the traditional form of public art projects and is integral to the process of inSite’s model of cultural production. Through a process of two-year periodic residencies, artists are commissioned to create new works that function as “interventions” in the context of the two bordering cities. However, where most public art projects usually stipulate a form of community dialogue under which certain characteristics remain inescapable—such as that a primary artist retains some direct control over the project, or that there is ultimately a piece of art which is displayed in a public forum for all to experience—inSite’s process veers from those presumptions. The intervention process which has become InSite’s anchoring philosophy in the 21st century is one that prizes the journey above the destination. These projects are utilized to induce public situations that engage border issuses rather than to construct aesthetic objects or representational artifacts.

In addition to various publications documenting the dialogues, public forums, and other interactions that are part of each intervention, inSite also hosts Farsites, a two-city museum exhibition that weaves together the themes that emerge from each cycle’s interventions. Additionally, some of the projects are experienced as public performance/spectacle, such as Javier Tellez’s One Flew over the Void, a human cannonball piece created in collaboration with patients from a mental institution, which saw a performer shot across the fence separating Mexico from the United States.

It's a bird. It's a plane. It's an... Intervention from Installation Gallery?!

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