Margaret Roberts, Sophie's Circles, 24 cardboard and paper circles, people, Times Square NYC 27 March 2017. Photo by Reto Stuber.

A special thankyou to the lovely people whose names I unfortunately do not know, who held these four circles for the photograph above, and then took two of them away with them. See YouTube video as well.

Thankyou also to Melissa Staiger who made Sophie's Circles for me in Times Square as part of Correspondence of Imaginary Places, in exchange for my installation of Melissa's work in Bird's Hut in April 6-9 2017 as part of the Cementa17 festival in Kandos, NSW Australia. Documentation of these and the other 7 works in Correspondence of Imaginary Places will be shown in Cuchifritos Gallery in New York in May-June 2017, and in ArticulateUpstairs in Sydney at the same time (opening Friday 26 May 2017). Thankyou also to Neptune Sweet and Reto Stuber for assisting and photographing in Times Square.

As explained in more detail here, Sophie's Circles aims to treat Sophie Taeuber's 1934 gouache painting Moving Circles (shown below), as a long-distance performance in which its 24 circles are understood as in pause-mode (for 83 years so far), waiting, like the Agave 'century plants', to begin to actually move. It facilitates this transformation by providing 24 circles, enlarged and of the same colours as in the painting, and inviting people to physically move them around, and thus take on the actual movement identified in Sophie's title. In Sophie's Circles Melissa made the circles in cardboard and coloured paper of 10 inches in diameter, and took them to Times Square where she asked people if they would like to hold them for photographs and then take them home with them. This way the circles moved around on that particular day, and hopefully also moved at least sometimes after that.

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Sophie Taeuber-Arp Moving Circles 1934 Gouache, 26 x 35 cm, Schmidt/Weber 1934/9, Fondazione Marguerite Arp, Locarno