Biennale, Dog is an appropriation of the posters made to promote biennial art exhibitions. Displayed alongside the official marketing materials of biennials (Shanghai, Berlin, Venice, etc.) Xu’s works provide a satiric and provocative alternative to the official system and make publicly visible images of many realities. Biennials help various localities produce their own art scenes and provide playgrounds for the international art world to expand its activities and influences. This is a highly contradictory process that renders local productions globally visible, but yet risks reducing their complexity, difference, and independence. In a way, these temporary art exhibitions are the perfect example of the negative and positive impact of globalization that affects both social reality and personal destiny. Xu’s Biennials enact and publicize different “possible scenarios” that these contradictory factors might effect on the social imaginary.
Xu Tan began his career as a member of the well-known Guangzhou-based artist collective Big Tail Elephant. His installation and video works explore issues crucial to the post-Cold War, post-colonial, and increasingly globalized world like urbanization, the geopolitical relationships between the developed and developing worlds in terms of political, economic, and cultural production and their impacts on personal lives and their expressions. Xu’s works are often site-specific, dealing intimately with everyday experiences to critically demonstrate the tension between globally circulating images, modes of communication, and the impact they have locally. Powerfully and intelligently, Xu’s work calls for contemporary art to engage with social reality in our time.
Qui vivra verra, Qui mourra saura is an installation by Minia Biabiany composed of the plan of a house made out of strips of salt, and a “garden” made of ceramic pieces, hanging from the ceiling and on the floor, and non woven fabric...
Observing the sky after 11 September 2001, Dennis Adams photographed elements which had been lifted by drafts and were floating above the city of New York...
BACC: Whose art centre is it anyway? | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Reuters via South China Morning Post October 23, 2019 By Siriwat Pokrajen (1,180 words, 6-minute read) Anyone following the news about the Thai art scene must have already known about all the rough storms the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC) has been sailing through in the past couple of years...
In the Trenches: Artists Encounter the Los Angeles River, Part 1 – Art and Cake August 30, 2023 August 30, 2023 Author In the Trenches: Artists Encounter the Los Angeles River, Part 1 Michelle Robinson 2023 What Was 4th Street Acylic paint on print 40×60 in By Lawrence Gipe In the mid-1980’s, I lived on Santa Fe Avenue and 7th Street, and the idea of Los Angeles having a “river” was a bit of a joke...
Pierre Leguillon features: “Diane Arbus: A Printed Retrospective, 1960-1971” December 6, 2008 – February 7, 2009 This first retrospective of the works of Diane Arbus (1923-1971) ever organized in France, brings together all the images commissioned to the New York photographer by the Anglo-Saxon press in the 1960s...
Unraveling, or “unweaving” sections of fabric, Maria Fernanda Plata arrived at delicate and tenuous-looking forms, both ghostly and gentle...
The Class (2005) by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook challenges the viewer’s personal sense of morality and tolerance by depicting a classroom from hell...
Austrian singer collaborates with ‘angklung’ musicians at Indonesian Cultural Night in Vienna (via The Jakarta Post) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Radar July 10, 2018 Angklung musicians featuring Austrian soprano Maria Theresia Gruber staged the song Bengawan Solo at the Indonesian Cultural Night event held at Vienna’s Weltmuseum on Tuesday evening...
In the Trenches: Artists Encounter the Los Angeles River, Part 1 – Art and Cake August 30, 2023 August 30, 2023 Author In the Trenches: Artists Encounter the Los Angeles River, Part 1 Michelle Robinson 2023 What Was 4th Street Acylic paint on print 40×60 in By Lawrence Gipe In the mid-1980’s, I lived on Santa Fe Avenue and 7th Street, and the idea of Los Angeles having a “river” was a bit of a joke...
Mass inclusion: thoughts on Teo Yeo Yenn’s ‘This is what Inequality looks like’ (via Dumbriyani) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Radar August 1, 2018 In recent days, I have been absorbed heavily into a book my wife brought home from Kinokuniya...
First Born by Rachel Rose is part of a series of works titled Borns which expands on the artist’s longstanding interest in the organic shape of eggs...