Parallel Skulpturenpark 2024, image: Parallel Vienna.
Blue Mountain Contemporary Art at Parallel Skulpturenpark
I contributed the text to present Blue Mountain Contemporary Art, an art collection actively shaping the contemporary Chinese art scene, at the Parallel Sculpture Park 2024. The exhibition includes BMCA’s sculpture commissions with Nikola Milojcevic and Red Huemer alongside works by Erik Tannhäuser and Han Feng. Taking place in the picturesque park around Villa Toscana at the northern end of Lake Traunsee, the Sculpture Park is organized as part of the art fair and exhibition platform Parallel Vienna and the historic, year-round cultural festival Salzkammergut Festwochen Gmunden. This year, as the European Capital of Culture, the Salzkammergut region, with its program connecting historical and contemporary art and culture, gives special significance to the Parallel Sculpture Park, which presents artists, institutions and galleries from all over Austria and Europe.
In the work of these four artists, sculpture takes its shape through mechanical fabrication, playful mimesis, traces of animal bodies, and conceptual (re)construction. Regardless of the different approaches, the man-made and natural environment evokes and is projected with rich sensual, emotional, and intellectual experiences, be it nostalgia, anxiety, adoration or curiosity. Indeed, valuable additions to the annual motto of the Salzkammergut Festwochen Gmunden, Central Questions, Great Emotions.
See details on BMCA’s webpage.
Knoten knüpfen
Knoten knüpfen (Tying Knots) is an exhibition project with agri_culture, on view at Zukunftshof, 1100 Vienna from Oct 2022. The exhibition is inspired by the I Ching phrase “governing by tying knots,” which evolves from a description of knots as public records in ancient times to a vision of ruling by the simplest means. How is a society run by tying knots? How is tying knots a practice of archiving? And how does house repair lead to an archive? Instead of longing for a utopian agrarian society, this exhibition of agri_culture engages the local and current connections between archiving and tying knots, as well as the promise of trust and openness in society.
The exhibition presents work by Johannes Wiener, collaborative production by Wiener, Salma Shaka, Maria Sanhueza, and Luis Prager, as well as documentary by Vladimíra Hradecká.
Curated by Li Yizhuo. Poster design by Wiener.
See event announcement by WUK in English and German.
“Research-Based Exhibitions: Between Curatorial Spatiality and Space as Method,” PARSE 13.3 (Autumn 2021).
Analyzing the exhibition “Archiving the Spaces of Anxiety” as an exemplary response to the OCAT Institute’s call for research-based curatorial projects, this essay compares the curator Chen Shuyu’s proposition of “curatorial spatiality,” situated in the lineage of artistic research, with the historiography of experimental Chinese art from the 1980s. The latter has been studied extensively by art historian Wu Hung, who also serves as OCAT’s Director, and explains research-based exhibitions evoking his own curatorial endeavors on Chinese art. This juxtaposition of interpretative frameworks aims to reveal the shared questions of space and approaches toward totality, despite diverging historical and artistic contexts. Besides the two directions focused on, this essay also considers the plurality of knowledge systems, experimental methods, and archival potentials by examining the relationship between research and exhibition.
Image: Liang Shuo, The Scroll of Great Mian Mountain, acrylic on linen, in “Archiving the Spaces of Anxiety,” image courtesy OCAT Institute.
slide by the Al Balad Residency team.
In the late summer of 2020 and 2021, I participated in the inaugural Al Balad Residency (Jeddah), initiated by Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Culture, while I develop a research and artistic project “Upstairs Map.”
Viral Transmission: A Medium in Between
Viral Transmission, OCAT Institute, image courtesy of the OCAT.
“Viral Transmission: A Medium in Between,” a group exhibition curated by me exploring digital media and virality, is currently on show at the OCAT Institute, Beijing, as part of its 2020 “Research-Based Curatorial Project.”
Exhibiting artists: Bai Mengfan, Peer Bode, Joan Snitzer, Eric Souther, Zhang Hanwen.
http://www.ocatinstitute.org.cn/en/exhibitions/20/159
The exhibition runs from September 12th to December 6th, 2020.
To read the exhibition statement.
To view the press in zh/中文.
House Letters Issue 2: Absence and Presence
House Letters Issue 2, edited and design by Bethany Holmes.
My article, “When Death Isn’t Elsewhere, and Neither Are We,” reflecting on Ragnar Kjartansson’s video installation has been included in House Letters Issue 2: Absence and Presence, Aug 2020.
House Letters (London) is an online publication project created by Bethany Holmes in response to this historical moment.
Access the article here.