Shanghai Biennale Awaiting Your Arrival
2000 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Xu Tan
Shanghai Biennale, Awaiting Your Arrival is an appropriation of the posters made to promote biennial art exhibitions. Displayed alongside the marketing posters of official biennials (Shanghai, Berlin, Venice, etc.) 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.
Colors:
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Daniel Crooks
2014The Illusion of Everything (2014) follows an unseen pedestrian as he navigates the Australian city of Melbourne’s dense and intricate network of laneways...
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Bani Abidi
2008The threshold in contemporary Pakistan between the security of private life and the increasingly violent and unpredictable public sphere is represented in Abidi’s 2009 series Karachi ...
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Jeffrey Vallance
1978Vallance’s Rocket is a vibrant picture in which masses of color and collage coalesce into a central vehicle, yet the whole surface seems lit with the roar of space travel...
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Clarissa Tossin
2012In Fordlândia Fieldwork (2012), Tossin documents the remains of Henry Ford’s rubber enterprise Fordlândia, built in 1928 in the Brazilian Amazon to export cultivated rubber for the booming automobile industry...
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© » KADIST
Daniel Crooks
2014The Illusion of Everything (2014) follows an unseen pedestrian as he navigates the Australian city of Melbourne’s dense and intricate network of laneways...
© » KADIST
Bani Abidi
2008The threshold in contemporary Pakistan between the security of private life and the increasingly violent and unpredictable public sphere is represented in Abidi’s 2009 series Karachi ...
© » KADIST
Sharon Lockhart
2011Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California results from Lockhart’s prolonged investigation of an agricultural center and community...
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Other works by: » Xu Tan
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Related artist(s) to: Xu Tan » Liu Ding, » Zheng Guogu, » Cao Fei, » Danh Vo, » Hu Fang, » Anton Vidokle, » Nairy Baghramian, » Rosemarie Trockel, » Simon Fujiwara, » Adrián Villar Rojas
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© » KADIST
Anton Vidokle
2020Shot in Oliveto Lucano, a village in the south of Italy, AUTOTROFIA (meaning self-eating) by artist Anton Vidokle is a cinéma vérité style film that slides fictive characters into real situations, and vice-versa, to draw a prolonged meditation on the cycle of life, seasonal renewal, and ecological awareness...
