On the evening before her opening at Portikus, Dawn Kasper will give a lecture on life, work and comedy.

The work of New York-based artist, Dawn Kasper, addresses a relentless obsessive fascination with topics such as exposure, desire, process, while using props, costume, comedy, gesture, repetition, music, and monologue to create what she refers to as "living sculptures."  When Dawn Kasper in 2008 lost her job and no longer could afford her studio, it became the beginning of the durational, art-life blurring On The Exposure of Process: A Nomadic Studio Practice Experiment. This project runs concurrently with another ongoing project Clues To The Meaning of Life, Visual Poems: Studies In Time and Space, both iterated and developed as they arrive in various spaces. For the 57th Venice Biennale, the artist participated with an instalment of the "Nomadic Studio Practice" series: The Sun, The Moon, and The Stars (2017) accumulated various art supplies, work tables, drum sets, loudspeakers and furniture into a 6-month durational performative installation in which she also lived and worked, turning the Central Pavilion into a public, itinerant "studio" space.

Select recent solo exhibitions include: Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; Tang Museum, Skidmore College, NY; ADN Collection, Bolzano, Italy; CCS Bard College, NY; Issue Project Room, New York; and David Lewis. Select group exhibitions include: American Academy in Rome, Italy; The 2012 Whitney Biennial, curated by Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Pacific Standard Time Public and Performance Art, Los Angeles, CA; Public Art Fund, Art Basel Miami Beach, FL; The Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, among others. Kasper is represented by David Lewis in New York, and has work included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; ADN Collection, Bolzano, Italy; and Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon.