Curator
With Curatorial Assistance from Hailey Kobron
Art Metropole
April 8 – May 31, 2026
Correspondence by Artists: Genesis P-Orridge presented mail art from musician, writer, and performance artist Genesis P-Orridge (1950–2020).
In the 1970s, P-Orridge sent piles of mail art to General Idea, whose FILE Megazine made use of the global postal system to access an alternative network for art dissemination, not bound by the exclusionary standards of galleries of the time. This network was especially appealing to artists like P-Orridge, who faced censorship and prosecution for experimental performance and collage artworks shared early in h/er career.
The mail art and ephemera included in this exhibition were sent to FILE Megazine early in P-Orridge’s artistic career, when s/he was working with COUM Transmissions and later Throbbing Gristle. P-Orridge’s dispatches were diverse in media and innovative in form: performance scripts, postcard “cut-ups”, elaborately decorated envelopes, COUM promotional ephemera, and newspaper clippings of scathing reviews—all of these materials found their way into General Idea’s mailbox during the proliferation of the mail art movement.
The materials sent by P-Orridge to General Idea and Art Metropole were collected, and are now preserved in the Art Metropole Collection at the National Gallery of Canada’s Library and Archives. Correspondence by Artists: Genesis P-Orridge briefly returned many of these archival materials to Art Metropole, for the first time since their 1999 transfer to the National Gallery.
Documentation by Nathaniel Fischer
Dallas Fellini 