The elevator at A4 Arts Foundation became a 'place' in the global group exhibition of Felix González-Torres' "Untitled" (Fortune Cookie Corner) (1990) re-imagined for May 2020.

This global show invited 1000 friends, artists, and colleagues of Felix González-Torres, Andrea Rosen and David Zwirner to act as 'places' in the total 'site' of this work, curated by Andrea Rosen.

Josh Ginsburg was invited to participate and offered the elevator at A4 as a place to stage this piece of the global performance. Up until recently, the elevator was a space of close-up encounters and clustered bodies. Since the temporary closure of arts galleries and museums, it has become a lonely cubicle of solitary confinement. Through this performance, the elevator was re-invigorated as the site for 700 fortune cookies, and as a single-chambered gallery.

A4 remains closed to the public until the restrictions placed on places of artistic production and performance are lifted. The installation closed with these layers of inaccessibility intact.

And yet, a kind of companionship was created through sharing the documentation of the project. Amongst the other 999 participants whose sites of installation mark the place of the exhibition, some photographed discreet fortunes, liberating lines of text that became stand-in messages for the many that must remain closed. Not touching became a meditation on intimacy, and sorts of familiarities – in which colleagues have entered kitchens and strangers have come into bedrooms through webinars and online classrooms – were enabled by isolation and social distancing.

Sealed within chambers, behind screens, inside of latex gloves, these unprecedented closenesses are a form of amity as well as its opposite: voyeurism (and not it), not togetherness (though it be that, too). The attendant promise of loss and absence found in the presence of love. 

In the images that remain as traces of the exhibit, the elevator lifts itself through A4's floors, opens its fortune to face a library of books; Kevin Beasley's show standing in wait inside A4's gallery; A4's classrooms and offices, emptied of participants.