SFMOMA Scavengers:performance and exhibition.

Devised, created and produced by Joshua Sofaer, SFMOMA Scavengers is part of an ongoing body of research with major international museums into the possibilities of participatory performance and the relationship between performance and fine art. SFMOMA Scavengers takes the form of a scavenger hunt and exhibition, in which members of the public form teams and are given clues of objects they have to find which Sofaer then uses to form a traditional gallery display. (After initial tests at the ICA in London and Coventry City Art Gallery, the project was produced in full scale in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in June 2005 ahead of the San Francisco version at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.)
The key research imperatives can be summarised as follows:
 to question the relationship between fine art and performance especially in relation to the art market (fine art as the perfect model of capitalism where basic materials accrue value and are sold on at profit/performance as a model of negative equity).
 to engage the audience of a work in its material creation (questioning the role of the artist as sole creator).
 to understand the objects of the everyday, lying around a city as the stuff of art (seeing the world through the eyes of an artist but also understanding the museum as conferring the status of art onto an object).
 to pursue object histories (to read an object through its own performative journey).
These imperatives were further explored in the accompanying symposium, Art Scavengers: A Symposium on Found Objects presented by Stanford University Humanities Center offered a wider critical framework within which to contextualise the work.
Portfolio: SFMOMA Scavengers DVD Documentary Short Associated Marketing Materials, Associated Press; www.joshuasofaer.com/wor23.php; www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/exhib_detail.asp?id=270