4:11 minutes
In the video work Drag, a man in a dark room pulls on the end of a rope. In midst of sounds of heavy breathing, the camera presents alternating scenes of a man and the shadow of a man wearing a long, pointed hat cast against a wall. Insinuating a sinister mood, the man and the shadow struggle to control the scene through alternating tugs and releases of a rope. The shadow dominates. Later, a human voice murmuring in low, deep tones provides a soundtrack to the visual ambiguity to produce and effect between something derivative of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and a mockery of human desire and struggle. The video ends with an epigram added by Chen: “You cannot, could not, be in the dark, about all the darkness”, an ominous warning of play on words seemingly urges the viewer to approach the incoherent narrative as a layered incantation of play on shadows.
Chen Xiaoyun studied ink painting at the Chinese Academy of Arts and lived as a writer in Suzhou before becoming part of the Hangzhou video art community. Chen’s works stages scenes of everyday life with elements of the strange and the absurd in order to explore existentialist themes through narratives of visual linearity. Chen is drawn to nighttime scenes of ambiguity, making use of shadows and silhouettes in concert with simple plots and fixed scenery to reconcile disjuncture in gazes and assert connections between the filmic eye and reality.
The series Nightmare Wallpapers represents a shift if Chuen’s practice, allowing the artist to immerse himself in an “artistic pilgrimage of self healing” following the failure of the 2014 Umbrella Movement...
The central point of Vanishing Point is the most direct physiological reaction of the body to the environment...
In Dilemma: Three Way Fork in the Road , Wang references Peking opera in a re-interpretation of traditional text...
Malani draws upon her personal experience of the violent legacy of colonialism and de-colonization in India in this personal narrative that was shown as a colossal six channel video installation at dOCUMENTA (13), but is here adapted to single channel...
Marc Desgrandchamps — Silhouettes — Musée d'Art Contemporain [mac], Marseille — Exposition — Slash Paris Connexion Newsletter Twitter Facebook Marc Desgrandchamps — Silhouettes — Musée d'Art Contemporain [mac], Marseille — Exposition — Slash Paris Français English Accueil Événements Artistes Lieux Magazine Vidéos Retour Marc Desgrandchamps — Silhouettes Exposition Peinture Marc Desgrandchamps, Sans Titre, 2015 (détail) Huile sur toile — 162 × 130 cm Courtesy de l’artiste et galerie Lelong & Co...
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Unregistered City is a series of eight photographs depicting different scenes of a vacant, apparently post-apocalyptic city: Some are covered by dust and others are submerged by water...
In Dilemma: Three Way Fork in the Road , Wang references Peking opera in a re-interpretation of traditional text...
Pak created New York Public Library Projects (NYPLP) (2008) during a residency in New York, using public libraries as exhibition spaces and the books they house as raw materials...
A mesmerizing experience of a vaguely familiar yet remote world, History of Chemistry I follows a group of men as they wander from somewhere beyond the edge of the sea through a vast landscape to an abandoned steel factory...
The central point of Vanishing Point is the most direct physiological reaction of the body to the environment...
The image of rusted nails, nuts and bolts as shrapnel sandwiched between a fried Chicken burger highlights the contrast between decadence and destruction...
The lengthy titles in Chen Xiaoyun’s work often appear as colophons to his photographs that invite the viewer to a process of self realization through contemplating the distance between word and image...
State Terrorism in the ultimate form of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood features a portrait of the artist wearing a zipped utilitarian jacket reminiscent of a worker’s uniform, with one arm behind his back as if forced to ingest a bundle of stick—a literal portrayal to the definition of fascism...
Nugroho’s installations and performances have their roots in the shadow puppet rituals in Indonesia, particularly the Javanese Wayang tradition whose essence is in the representation of the shadows...
This early photographic work by Fre?de?ric Nauczyciel, titled Untitled (Boîte à prière, Istanbul, Novembre 2005) , features a young man in religious attire reading a religious text from inside a glass prayer box...