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.
The Illusion of Everything (2014) follows an unseen pedestrian as he navigates the Australian city of Melbourne’s dense and intricate network of laneways...
The 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 ...
In Jackass (2008) by Ari Marcopoulos, his two sons, Cairo and Ethan, are pictured relaxing in a disheveled bedroom in their Sonoma home...
Kwan Sheung Chi’s work One Million is a video work depicting the counting of bills...
The Illusion of Everything (2014) follows an unseen pedestrian as he navigates the Australian city of Melbourne’s dense and intricate network of laneways...
The 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 ...
A photograph of a tin box full of marijuana simply titled Green Box, speaks to the constantly changing status of the substance–once taboo or illicit, now a symbol of a growing industry in Northern California...
New Mochi Pizza Restaurant Is Offering Free Slices in Palo Alto | KQED Skip to Nav Skip to Main Skip to Footer upper waypoint Food Free Mochi Pizza For National Pizza Day? Yes, Please Alan Chazaro Feb 6 Save Article Save Article Failed to save article Please try again Email A new Peninsula pizzeria believes mochi and pizza are the perfect combination...
An orphaned artist paints for support (via The Phnom Penh Post) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Radar July 5, 2018 Self-taught artist Yi Kakada has spent the past six years demonstrating his skills by painting on walls, fences and other public areas, often without getting paid...
Shot 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...
Based on historical prophecies and fantasy, the artist creates apocalyptic scenarios that posit an enigmatic world plagued by social, political, and environmental upheaval...