LOS ANGELES, CA.-The Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) will open its doors to the public for a 4 month period from November 14, 2005 – March 31, 2006. This special open house will borrow its form from the Renaissance “Wunderkammer” tradition—every usable surface of the Institute will be covered with projects created during the organization’s 15 year history. In addition, the creative activities of the Institute’s more than 25 Associates will be presented in varying states of process. A reception will be held on November 13, 2005 from 2-5 p.m.

The open house event, which will take place in the Institute’s unique indoor and outdoor structure, will include an unprecedented showing of the AIDS Chronicles – an ongoing Institute project that explores the mass media’s response to the AIDS pandemic. On a massive four story wall that borders one side of the ICI property, over 500 pages of the Chronicles - a sampling of single pages of the yearly Chronicle from 1992 through the present day, 2005 - will be hung in a minimalist display. Inside the Institute’s library and repository, a presentation will focus on the Manual of Lost Ideas, a unwieldy document that was delivered to the ICI years ago in an old suitcase with LAKE painted on one side. And in the Institute’s laboratory, ICI will “publish,” in a single wall edition, Georges Bataille’s erotic novella, Story of the Eye, This revised and out-of-print rare version of “the Eye” will be punctuated by 13 prints commissioned by ICI from an international roster of artists for a special edition of the Institute’s first major title, Bataille’s Eye (ICI Press,1997). Also in the Laboratory, over 15 projects by ICI Associates will be viewed at individual stations, including The Roman Forum, a multi-media parody of the American political system by Robert Allen featuring a video of a recognizable president “Apologizing for Everything”; the Tracking Project by Martin Gantman an intriguing interactive conceptual art puzzle — part noir detective hunt and part scientific excavation; the Museum of Forgery founded and directed by Antoinette LaFarge; Searching for Sebald, a “Steineresque” investigation by Christel Dillbohner and Lise Patt of the late author and photographer, W.G. Sebald; the west coast premiere of Severance by award-winning filmmaker, Lorie Josephsen; and in the Institute Garden, Take a Minute, Take Five a visual reinterpretation of the simple park bench by Melinda Smith Altshuler. Other associates include: Lothar Schmitz, Deborah Paulsen, Sande Sisneros, Arnaldo Morales, Johanne Todd, Danny Refern, Yolande Macias McKay, and Deborah Cullen .

Since 1991, the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) has explored the role of visuality in forming, perpetrating and imagining the intangible and ever-changing phenomena known as “culture.” Many of the ICI projects focus on mechanisms of analysis that through time have become lost, forgotten or suppressed, even though they still influence and model modern thinking. Other activities focus on contemporary culture and common assumptions that are so entrenched they operate almost invisibly. The ICI sponsors displays, symposia, workshops, performances and provides numerous opportunities for both the artist fabricator and the curious spectator of visual culture. The organization also maintains an active publishing program.