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The four-channel video installation Same Old Crowd departs from the documentation of an unknown city and takes place in an ambiguous temporal and spatial frame. Twelve characters (amateur actors hired by the artist) appear in black-and-white in highly stylized surroundings wearing patterned cloths. The identities or time period of the characters, all deprived of languages, are impossible to determine. Punctuated by staccato sounds and fast camerawork, the protagonists’ exaggerated expressions and emphatic gestures create a high level of tension. For the artist, repetitions in the video do not attempt to level notion of “difference.” Rather repetition is antithetical to the notion of novelty within the discourse of reality, modernity, and media. As such, Same Old Crowd recalls the artists’ earlier video Beyond Geography and can also be seen as a type of anthropological theater intersecting with performance studies.
Li Ran produces video, installation, and performance-based works that examine various states of parody and simulacra in the digital world. Through performative narrative, reproduction, mimicry, and satire, Li Ran’s work straddles the line between fact and fiction in playful explorations of the meaning and making of truth. Li describes his own artwork with the language of architecture: that if an artwork is like a room, its meaning should be open and porous, not forced against a unilateral interpretation. This virtual-minded analogy is fitting, as Li’s practice increasingly hinges on the exploration of the non-reality within reality.
After 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...
Migrant Ecologies Project: A Grain of Wheat Inside a Salt Water Crocodile | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Grain of Wheat July 8, 2019 For the benefit of the possible intelligences that may find these treasures after humans have long gone, we have translated one of the photographs of our wheat gleaning ceremony in Singapore into binary code...
In the video installation A Gust of Wind , Zhang continues to explore notions of perspective and melds them seamlessly with a veiled but incisive social critique...
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...
The video installation Le Fou Postcolonial Insane by Guy Woueté is a series of five videos that examine the concept of insanity in the post-colonial Democratic Republic of Congo...
Fiction versus Documentation: The Multiple Representations of Reality, with Marie Voignier, Jiang Zhi, and Dong Bingfeng held at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing In the first episode of Video Talks , Marie Voignier (artist & nominee of The Marcel Duchamp Prize 2018), Jiang Zhi (artist), and Dong Bingfeng (curator/critic) discuss the relationship between fiction and documentation in video art, through the perspectives of their own practices...
The working processes of artists: Raka Maitra from CHOWK | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles September 20, 2019 In this video, LASALLE students Ernie Martha and Raesmi Nambiar speak to Raka Maitra, founder and artistic director of CHOWK, on the practice of contemporary dance in Singapore, her roots as a classical Odissi dancer in India and the challenges CHOWK faces as a dance company...