“Nice” Box
LMRM (Hope Wang & Murat Ahmed)
11 x 10 x 4 inches
Aluminum silk screen, emulsion, color pencil, packing foam, cardboard box
2025“Nice” Box features a single pre-exposed silk screen ready for print. Each unique screen features fragments of text from LMRM’s email response to being asked to “donate” the production and end result of 18 works of art to a permanent collection. LMRM laid out the math around the labor and material expenses involved in the proposition to confirm if they sincerely meant to ask two individuals to donate almost $20,000 USD to a major institution that did not have the budget to pay artists themselves.
"Nice" Box pokes fun at the unoriginality of such delusional entitlement in these inquiries, which may be met with equally reproducible answers.
This item was produced as part of The Institute of Making Space for Noncompetitve Looms Gift Shop, a collaboration between four collectives: LMRM, Making Space, The Bureau of Noncompetitive Research, and The Institute of Institutional Critique. Having bonded over their shared interests in collaboration, slowness, and the unseen labour demanded by cultural work, each collective has produced merchandise that speaks to the continuous bureaucratic and administrative work that has become an essential part of the creative process. The merchandise for sale at this quasi-fictitious gift shop draws attention to the fundraising, bookkeeping, planning, feeding, conflict management, and imaginative problem-solving that is asked of artists and arts workers in order to make and show their work.
This semi-fictional gift shop is an exhibition at Whippersnapper Gallery (Toronto) as part of a programming series supported by Collective Collective.
Humour (and thus, spite) can create bridges more than it creates distance. The pettiness that seems to be the connective tissue between each of our collectives…has become a generative modality for the cultural work we all do.
“As a cultural worker, the sentiment of ‘if it’s not happening, it’s being dreamt,’ is really powerful when you sometimes have to make decisions based on paying rent.”
— The Bureau of Non-Competitive Research
Photography by Darren Rigo