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 ...
Untitled (Women) (2011) presents a startlingly succinct history of violently romanticized femininity...
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 ...
The primary interest in the trilogy is Joskowicz’s use of cinematic space, with long tracking shots that portray resistance to habitual viewing experiences of film and television...
Meireles, whose work often involves sound, refers to Sal Sem Carne (Salt Without Meat) as a “sound sculpture.” The printed images and sounds recorded on this vinyl record and it’s lithographed sleeve describe the massacre of the Krahó people of Brazil...
Re: Looking marks a new phase in Wong’s work which connects his region’s history with other parts of the world...
Michigan Central Station is part of a larger photographic series, Detroit Photos , which includes images of houses, theaters, stadiums, offices, and other municipal structures...
This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat...
The Class (2005) by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook challenges the viewer’s personal sense of morality and tolerance by depicting a classroom from hell...
Vallance’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...
Kwan Sheung Chi’s work One Million is a video work depicting the counting of bills...
Invited in 2007 to the Museum Folkwang in Essen (Germany), Simon Starling questioned its history: known for its collections and particularly for its early engagement in favor of modern art (including the acquisition and exhibition of works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse), then destroyed during the Second World War, the museum was pillaged for its masterpieces of ‘degenerate art’ by the nazis...
The primary interest in the trilogy is Joskowicz’s use of cinematic space, with long tracking shots that portray resistance to habitual viewing experiences of film and television...
Created for the tenth Lyon Bienniale, in Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother, Wong’s ongoing negotiation of postcolonial globalization takes aim at French society...
Some Dead Don’t Make a Sound (Hay muertos que no hacen ruido) is a single-channel video by Claudia Joskowicz that features the Mexican legend of the Weeping Woman (La Llorona) as its main protagonist...
Herculine’s Prophecy by Juliana Huxtable features a kneeling demon-figure on what appears to be a screen-print, placed on a wooden table, which has then been photographed and digitally altered to appear like a book cover, with a title and subtitle across the top, and a poem written across the bottom...