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...
La loi sur le mécénat fête ses 20 ans en attendant un enrichissement Offrir Le Monde Article réservé aux abonnés Au colloque organisé lundi 11 décembre, au Musée Guimet, à Paris, pour les 20 ans de la loi sur le mécénat qu’il avait portée, l’ancien ministre de la culture Jean-Jacques Aillagon devait être le roi de la fête, mais le Covid en a décidé autrement...
Unraveling, or “unweaving” sections of fabric, Maria Fernanda Plata arrived at delicate and tenuous-looking forms, both ghostly and gentle...
Shahab Fotouhi’s photographic series Establishing Shot; Interior, Night – Exterior, Day; without Antagonist and Extra consists of four C-prints that at first glance would appear to be travel posters for Iran, in that each features a beautifully shot image of an Iranian waterfall...
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...
During her research on primitive currencies and cultural cannibalism, Cuevas came across the Donald Duck comic book issue “The Stone Money Mystery,” where Donald goes on a quest to find missing museum objects...
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...
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...
Converting is a piece about the Orang Laut, often called Sea Nomads, that inhabited the Riau archipelago...
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...
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...