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...
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...
This untitled ink and pencil drawing by James “Yaya” Hough is made on what the artist calls “institutional paper”, or the state-issued forms that monitor the daily activities of prisoners, of which, each detainee is generally required to fill out in triplicate...
5 Ways To Integrate Art Within Urban Infrastructure Home » 5 Ways To Integrate Art Within Urban Infrastructure ART & DESIGN Nov 29, 2023 Ξ Leave a comment 5 Ways To Integrate Art Within Urban Infrastructure posted by Kelly Schoessling This beautiful murals is one of the ways to integrate art within urban infrastructure...
An early work in Sung Hwang Kim’s career, the video Summer Days in Keijo—written in 1937 is a fictional documentary, the film is based on a non-fiction travelogue, In Korean Wilds and Villages , written by Swedish zoologist Sten Bergman, who lived in Korea from 1935 to 1937...
Rotation presents the image of a crowd, a re-appropriation of 19th or beginning of 20th century photographs published in newspapers and magazines...
Unraveling, or “unweaving” sections of fabric, Maria Fernanda Plata arrived at delicate and tenuous-looking forms, both ghostly and gentle...
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
Ambiguous Gestures takes as its point of origin a film Gmelin discovered in his father’s archive...
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...
The Class (2005) by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook challenges the viewer’s personal sense of morality and tolerance by depicting a classroom from hell...