Biennale, Dog is an appropriation of the posters made to promote biennial art exhibitions. 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 ...
Destilaciones ( Distillations , 2014) is an installation composed of a group of ceramic pots, presented on the floor and within a steel structure...
A Flags-Raising-Lowering Ceremony at my home’s cloths drying rack (2007) was realized in the year of the 10th anniversary of the establishment of The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China...
Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor, through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...
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...
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 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...
Open Mind is a model created by Capote for a traversable public maze that, when seen from above, resembles the human brain...
The perceived effortlessness of power, projecting above experiences of labored subordination is examined in Death at a 30 Degree Angle by Bani Abidi, which funnels this projection of image through the studio of Ram Sutar, renowned in India for his monumental statues of political figures, generally from the post-independence generation...
Days of Our Lives: Reading is from a series of work was created for the 10th Biennale de Lyon by the artist...
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
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...
Re: Looking marks a new phase in Wong’s work which connects his region’s history with other parts of the world...
Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...
This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat...
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
Forest Gathering N.2 is part of the series of photographs Beneath the Roses (2003-2005) where anonymous townscapes, forest clearings and broad, desolate streets are revealed as sites of mystery and wonder; similarly, ostensibly banal interiors become the staging grounds for strange human scenarios...
In this work the artist stages a humorously violent “intervention” against male-dominated cultures of art production in present-day China...