Curatorial correctness has never carried much weight at Exit Art, the venerable SoHo alternative space that has now relocated to new Manhattan quarters on 10th Avenue, at 36th Street. Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo established it in their Canal Street loft in 1982 with the intention of doing things differently.

Their mindset has resulted in an exhibition-performance space that often seems to be making itself up as it goes along, yet usually keeps its act impressively together. Some shows have received extremely mixed reviews, but most have shed new light in some direction, whether on unknown artists, underground comics, record album covers, exhibition announcements or 1970's performance art from behind the Iron Curtain. Ms. Ingberman and Mr. Colo have always pushed the envelope in exhibition themes, formats, selection processes and installation procedures.

''Exit Biennial: The Reconstruction,'' the first show in their new, vaulting ground-floor home, indicates that the pushing continues. The 35 works -- installations and site-specific pieces -- share one primary characteristic: none of them existed when the show began four weeks ago. All have been built since then, where they stand.

During the opening reception on March 8, the 43 participating artists (there are several teams and collectives) arrived with their tools and materials, posted their proposals and drawings and set to work. Several are working still and may continue until tomorrow, when the show has its second opening celebration.

''The Reconstruction'' reflects the current fad for what might be called reality art-making, the phenomenon of creating art in an exhibition space after the show opens. Big surveys of contemporary art often include one or two works done in this manner. Ms. Ingberman and Mr. Colo saw their new space, which has not yet been renovated, as an opportunity to apply the concept even more broadly.

They also deviated from habit in their selection process, putting out an open call for proposals on the theme of reconstruction. The artists chosen were to receive almost nothing. Space and electricity would be provided, of course, but no help from Exit Art's meager staff and almost no budget. Ms. Ingberman said they expected about 60 responses but received close to 400. Many were from out-of-town artists, including a few students. The final group includes less than 10 artists they had even heard of; most have never exhibited in New York City.

''The Reconstruction'' illustrates Exit Art's sandbox genre of exhibition management: cram a lot of mostly young artists together and see what happens. Much of what results is quintessential alternative-space art: rough-hewn, politically skeptical, user-friendly and short on originality, but sparked with promise.

It is always valuable to see a lot of different artists burrowing their way through a single theme and set of limitations: they all come up in different places. The reconstruction concept is personalized, stretched from the literal to the metaphorical by the show's participants, and explored in modes, variously architectural, historical, cultural or emotional. Not unexpectedly, references to building processes abound, in materials that range from bulky to almost nothing, with the contrasts emphasized by the tightly packed nature of the installation.

On a little strip of space, hemmed in by two of the show's most obtrusive works, Orly Genger has spent the last four weeks crocheting quantities of thick yarn into squares, rectangles and less predictable shapes, which she arranges and rearranges as a floor sculpture. (After using them in a performance at tomorrow's opening, she will continue working, and arranging, until the show closes.)

On one side of Ms. Genger's small plot, Frantiska and Tim Gilman have suspended a life-size, fully furnished cabin upside down from the ceiling; they are using real construction materials like vinyl siding and imitation-slate shingles that are almost scarily lightweight. To the other side, Ward Shelley, Matt Bua and Jesse Bercowetz have constructed the decidedly ponderous ''Sweatshop,'' a jury-rigged shanty-factory spewing pollutants and carbuncled with old but functioning television monitors. This irrational assemblage mixes real with fake on all fronts, from the posters that plaster its surface to the frantic assembly line, operated by robots, that is visible in some of the videos.

Another cabin, by Kate Gilmore, takes assemblage to even rougher, teeter-tottering extremes. Cobbled together from construction scraps scavenged from neighboring streets, it suggests the dangerously heavy, poorly anchored gondola of a hot-air balloon. Lisa Hein and Bob Seng used the four-week construction period to build a wall out of brick-shaped slabs of cherry, lemon and lime Jell-O and mortar, a Sisiphyean task fraught with accelerated intimations of mortality. While the bricks at the bottom of the wall rapidly fall into decay, those on the top are as fresh as hard candy. The artists are aiming for five feet.

A similar misapplication of materials prevails in Derek Coté's piece, an elegant, full-scale construction scaffolding made entirely of cardboard. Another feat of construction is Ted McGurn's large, seemingly perfect loop made of wood, which promises to attract skateboarders with stronger-than-average death wishes. Rebecca Herman and Mark Shoffner pay tribute to one of nature's architectural feats, the beaver dam.

Reconstruction as memory takes physical form in Anne Rowland's piece, a re-creation of the crawl space from her childhood home, done in cinder block, plywood and dirt. Memory is also a factor in the hollow arch that Jenny Polak is building between two columns. Containing a tiny crawl space reached by an enclosed ladder and inspired by the hiding places and secret rooms where European Jews sometimes waited out World War II, it reintroduces an element that has been largely expunged from modern architecture.

Alessandra Torres is re-enacting an experience that lies beyond memory: her first week of life, spent in an incubator. Her adult-size incubator, which she will occupy for periods during the show, is flanked by another bit of history: Larry Bamburg's tribute to the gallery's previous life as a car showroom. Still being built, his installation is to include a real pick-up truck that appears to be sinking in water made of paper. (The Hudson River, perhaps?) The best thing about it during a visit last weekend was the meticulous reconstruction of one of the space's tall plate-glass windows and its clerestory, which suggests a showroom in the round.

Physical and cultural reconstruction overlap in the United Nations refugee tent erected by Mariam Ghani, an Afghan-Lebanese-American who is in computer contact with friends and family in Kabul, Afghanistan. Visitors can sit on big cushions and have tea while perusing e-mail messages and video updates on the rebuilding of the city. (She will present much of the material on her Web site, kabul-reconstructions.net.) A similar duality operates next door in ''Ricanstruction Salon,'' where Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz will do makeovers using the makeup and hairstyles often favored by Puerto Rican women. Accompanying the process are videos about Afro-Caribbean music and dance, with emphasis on salsa.

Several works occupy what might be called the next-to-nothing category. In a piece that suggests interior reconstruction, Rob Anderson has been and will continue cleaning the gallery's entire floor with a toothbrush, a few square feet each day. His air of meditative concentration contrasts noticeably and nicely with the prevailing sense of bustle and bulk. Christian Tomaszewski is expanding the space, multiplying its forms and restructuring the viewer's perception with a big mirrored wall on wheels that anyone can move about. Colin Zaug has built a crude kind of weather system, using fans and paper cones. It may or may not get some meteorological competition from the TAG collective's mist machine, which, after some last-minute design correction, was beginning to be built last weekend.

Certain efforts take the form of services. The project of J. Gabriel Lloyd and John McGurk, two art students from the Rhode Island School of Design, amounts to well-conceived student work that is sweetly derivative of that of Rirkrit Tiravanija and Andrea Zittel. They are serving a free weekend brunch from a rolling kitchen disguised as a white Minimalist cube. (They do this on alternate weekends, including this one: they will be at 10th Avenue and 24th Street tomorrow and in front of Exit Art on Sunday.) Peter Simensky's ''Aahrt-Boy,'' a line of large, pricey and exceptionally tasty candy bars, in production since March 8, goes on sale today. The ingredients listed include chunky peanut butter, chocolate chips, raisins and other delectable basics. The nutrition information promises ambition, inspiration, charisma, smarts and longevity. Each bar costs $5, but Mr. Simensky said every artist in the exhibition would receive one free. Two might be better.

Although not usually interested in predictability of any kind, Ms. Ingberman and Mr. Colo plan to make ''Exit Biennial'' a regular event, varying the theme but not the open-call selection process. Otherwise, their operation remains remarkably the same: small, grass-roots, running largely on guts and will. This is striking at a time when other exhibition spaces and small museums of a certain age -- P.S. 1, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the New Museum of Contemporary Art -- are moving up the museum food chain. The New York art world, contemporary art in particular, is lucky that they are. But it is equally lucky that Exit Art, like Peter Pan, seems disinclined to grow up.

''Exit Biennial: The Reconstruction'' is at Exit Art, 475 10th Avenue, at 36th Street, Manhattan, (212) 966-7745, was in-house through May 4, but call to see if it was extended, or what is showing now.