The Tower of Babel: The Carnaval
2010 - Photography (Photography)
Du Zhenjun
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale. These photographs present a series of urban landscapes and assembled Foucauldian structures of the present. Du sees the Tower of Babel as a continually reinvented narrative that warns people of “dangerous tendencies in the present time.” Du’s Babylonian towers resurrect from fallen rubbles of religious history in grand scale to focus on modern crises of civilization. Though the theme began with the struggle of monotheism over linguistic and geographic diversity in early human history, Babel in Du’s work has become a contemporary vision of catastrophic threat to the future of humanity.
Born in 1961, Du was trained as a painter and sculptor at the Institutes of Arts and Trades in Shanghai and the Fine Arts College at the University of Shanghai and garnered M.A. from the Regional School of Fine Arts of Rennes, France in 1999. Despite his classical training, Du became one of the first generation of artists to incorporate digital technologies into art pieces, producing interactive installations and describing digital media to be “a way of working on the dimension of power inherent to a society of information and new technologies.” Du’s works explore themes of “Modern Man” and human tragedy. Specifically, he highlights the ecstasy of human behavior in light of suffering and challenges in conveying what he calls the “universal human condition.”
Colors:
Other related works, blended automatically
© » KADIST
Du Zhenjun
2010The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
© » KADIST
Qing Zhang
2006603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...
© » KADIST
Cinthia Marcelle
2012Cinthia Marcelle’s video work Automóvel (2012) re-edits the mundane rhythms of automotive traffic into a highly compelling and seemingly choreographed meditation on sequence, motion, and time...
© » KADIST
Jennifer Bornstein
1994Collectors’ Favorites is an episode of local cable program from the mid-1990s in which ordinary people were invited to present their personal collections—a concept that in many ways anticipates current reality TV shows and internet videos...
© » KADIST
Piero Golia
2007Golia’s Untitled 3 is an installation in which a mechanical device is programmed to shoot clay pigeons that are thrown up in front of a white wall...
© » KADIST
Chen Shaoxiong
2007After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective...
© » KADIST
Pak Sheung Chuen
2008Pak 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...
© » KADIST
Allan McCollum
1982In the work titled The Glossies (1980), an affinity for photography manifested itself before McCollum actually began to use photography as a medium...
© » KADIST
Chen Chieh-Jen
2010Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
© » KADIST
Pak Sheung Chuen
2017The 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...
