Click here to read more about the exhibition on the UAG website: www.universityartgallery.ucsd.edu

Click here to read more about the conference

About the Participants

Julian d’Angiolillo

Julian d’Angiolillo is a visual artist, filmaker and playwright whose work explores questions of urbanism, spatial practice, public space and memory. This exhibition features his recent feature-length film Hacerme Feriante [Become a Stallholder], along with documentation of its creation. The film is the product of d’Angiolillo’s intensive research on a massive informal market known as La Salada. Condemned by the European Union for violations of brand copyright laws, La Saladais the largest informal market of its kind in Latin America, attracting migrants from Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay and the Argentine countryside. D’Angiolillo’s film examines the coordinated efforts of stallholders, local bosses or caudillos, and visitors who open the fair in the middle of the night or pre-dawn hours twice weekly. Italso explores the ways in which the market is far more than a site of commerce, and is also a place for celebrations, religious ceremony and popular assemblies and a strategic field where the identity of immigrants and workers is reaffirmed.

www.elnuevomunicipio.com.ar

Eduardo Molinari

Eduardo Molinari is a multidisciplinary artist whose work centers on research through artistic methods and walking as an aesthetic practice. His Archivo Caminante [The Walking Archive] is a meta-work that is both an archival collection he has, maintained since 2001, as well as the manifestation of his ongoing artistic-cum-research practice. This practice draws on varied epistemological frameworks and methodologies, including those associated with militant research, conceptual art, ethnography, post-colonial historiography, travel writing and psychogeography. El Camino Real is a diptych comprised of an installation that features documents drawn from the Archive and the book, El Libro Plateado y Real, appearing in its first English translation. In El Camino Real history unfolds in a non-linear and palimpsestic time that moves between the Southern Cone’s colonial history, Argentina’s hyper-neoliberalization in the 1990s and ensuing economic crash, and the potentiality of popular revolt and armed struggle seen in the country in the early 1970s. This work not only refigures a sense of national identity, but also proposes an especial understanding of the past — one that encompasses the unpredictable landscape of collective memory, fugitive events and experiences that have escaped the archival record, and the untapped potentialities still latent within them.

www.archivocaminante.blogspot.com

Jennifer Flores Sternad

Jennifer Flores Sternad is a scholar and curator whose research focuses on militant and activist art, performance, and artistic practices developed within or in alignment with social movements. Since 2001 her work in these fields has included extensive research in Argentina, Brazil and Chile, as well as on Xicano/a and Latino/a art and theater in the U.S. Her texts have been published in books and academic journals in the US, Europe and Latin America, including Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization (NAi, 2011); Live Art in LA, 1970-1983 (with Suzanne Lacy, Routledge, 2011 forthcoming); Zona de Poesia Árida: Coletivos de Arte (Universidad de São Paulo, 2011 forthcoming), MEX/LA: Mexican Modernisms in Los Angeles (with Ricardo Bracho, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011 forthcoming); Haciendo Tiempo: Arte Radical, 1999-2004 (Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de Mexico, 2010); and the journals GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies; Contemporary Theatre Review; The Journal of American Drama and Theater and Interreview. She has directed and produced public art events in Argentina, Chile and California and she is co-founder with Fran Ilich of the media art/research project Collective Intelligence Agency. She holds a BA in Literature from Harvard, an MA in Art History from UCLA, and she is currently a doctoral candidate and MacCracken Fellow in American Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU.

Click here to read more about TOP

Does art today expect anything from images? It seems instead that almost everyone possesses the rights and means to produce pictures and artists resemble aborigines defending an isolated island, waiting for their loss. They however still aspire to declare their special rights and Never Forget The Image Struggle! is such a declaration, it is also a “loss”, warning that they are facing. Simultaneously, the sentence “Never Forget The Image Struggle!” isn’t a warning directed to the artists only but to everyone. In fact the identity of the artist can easily be taken, and those “special rights” are similar to a reward that always need to be fought for. By the end, the responsibility of the artist is to take the role of a “busybody”. The definition of “Image Struggle” transcends the art system. As a “pure space of images” it constitutes a composition between society, reality, politics and aestheticism revolution, it is an internal democratic space. Within these boundaries, “special rights” isn’t a free meal. In this “real desert” it reclaims the….Never forget!

i8 Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Ragnar Kjartansson (on view December 15 – January 21). Kjartansson’s work often explores contrasting emotions; on this occasion, love and death.

The video installation, Song (2011), is based on Kjartansson’s 2011 three-week performance, Song, in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Hall of Sculpture. The work features Kjartansson’s three nieces, Ragnheidur Harpa Leifsdóttir, Rakel Mjöll Leifsdóttir, and Íris María Leifsdóttir, performing a gentle folk song written by Kjartansson, for six continuous hours. The slowly circling camera adds to the hypnotic and eerie repetition of the singers.

For Song, Kjartansson was strongly influenced by the Carnegie Museum’s industrial age spirit and the Hall of Sculpture itself – a replication of the interior of the Greek Parthenon. Having previously devised the song from a misremembered verse of Allen Ginsberg’s poem, Song, Kjartansson envisioned his nieces in this space, enacting this delicate hymn to love. Directly following more overtly masculine works such as The End (2009), Kjartansson was interested in the perceived softness and femininity of this imagined tableau. Empty and filled with changing natural light filtered through the skylights as day turned to night, the Hall would register a strange conflation of timelessness and the fleeting nature of experience with the girls’ voices echoing as they sang the central lyric: “The weight of the world / is love”.

The video was shot over the course of the six-hour performance in one-shot, using a technique invented by the artist’s cameraman. The camera movement can be felt through the visible frame rate, adding to the physical connection to the space and evoking Eisenstein’s idea of “the camera as machine”. As the viewer watches, the spotlight turns into the moon; the artifice of production giving way to a hypnotic paean to beauty and love. With Song, Kjartansson continues to experiment with durational performance as seen in his Venice Biennial six-month studio performance, The End – Venice (2009); The Great Unrest (2005); Schumann Machine (2008); and most recently Bliss (2011), a 12-hour staging of The Marriage of Figaro’s finale at Performa 11.

From the Valley of World-Weariness in British Columbia (2011), is a group of watercolours made during a two-day hiking trip in a dramatic Canadian landscape of burnt ash trees. The setting had a visceral impact on the artist who notes that, “the trees can be seen as a symbol of death and the paintings as souvenirs of a place unreal”. As in most of Kjartansson’s work, there is a performative element to the paintings, having been made ‘en plein air’, but perhaps more pronounced in them is the sense of isolation, as if they were created “under the burden of solitude”.

For more information visit: www.i8.is

Ragnar Kjartansson (b. 1976) has been experimenting with elements of visual art, music, and theater and considers himself mainly a performance artist. His pieces are characterized by the play between contradictory feelings- sorrow and happiness, horror and beauty, drama and humor.

Banner images: From the Valley of World-Weariness in British Columbia, 2011 (III, IV, and VIII) watercolour on paper

The exhibition Walid Raad – 2011 Hasselblad Winner will be shown at Hasselblad Center (www.hasselbladfoundation.org), Gothenburg, Sweden, until January 15, 2012. The exhibition presents a broad overview of Raad’s work from the early 1980s until today, among others his remarkable project The Atlas Group (1989–2004), about the Lebanese wars (1975–1990), through which he received widespread attention. In this project Raad often attributed his documents to imaginary characters as he investigated how events of extreme violence were lived, experienced and represented. Also included in the exhibition is Raad’s ongoing series Sweet Talk (1987–present), an investigation of Beirut, its residents and spaces. This series consists of photo assignments Raad gave himself to capture the changing face of his home city. The curator is Gunilla Knape of the Hasselblad Foundation.

In conjunction with the exhibition a book, Walid Raad – I Might Die Before I Get a Rifle, Hasselblad Award 2011, has been produced in collaboration with Steidl Verlag, Göttingen. For more information visit: www.hasselbladfoundation.org/current-exhibition/en

Walid Raad, was born in Chbanieh, Lebanon in 1967. He lives and works in Beirut and New York, and is Associate Professor of Art in The Cooper Union, School of Art, New York, since 2002.

The Hasselblad Foundation is an independent non-profit entity, created to promote research and academic teaching in the natural sciences and photography. This aim is achieved by means of donations and grants for scientific research, through the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, as well as several scholarships and grants for research projects in photography.  Victor Hasselblad (1906–1978), the pioneering Swedish photographer and industrialist, manufactured a camera which has become world famous, not least in connection with the manned trips to the moon. After his death, the Hasselblad Foundation was established in 1979 under the terms of the last will and testament of Dr. Victor Hasselblad and his wife Erna.

Banner Image: I Might Die Before I Get a Rifle: Untitled, Device III, 1989-2008 © Walid Raad

The exhibit was curated especially for the UAG by Jennifer Flores Sternad, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU and a leading critic and scholar of political art in the Americas.

Arrhythmias showcased art practices developed in Argentina since the mid-1990s that demonstrate exceptionally creative, and widely diverse, modes of engagement with present-day social and political struggles. The artists featured in the exhibition combine artistic practices and the pursuit of creative experimentation with methodologies and epistemologies, such as those associated with militant research, radical pedagogy, direct action, community organizing, critical cartography, tactical media and Brechtian theater. Many of the projects in the exhibition were developed through direct contact with, or in explicit alignment with, left social movements. In some cases, the artistic practice was coextensive with popular forms of struggle or grass-roots organizing. Other projects include anti-imperialist historiographical interventions that interweave the Southern Cone’s colonial history with its present-day neoliberal order, studies of vast informal economies and the migrant and local labor that sustains them, and provocative street performances and media interventions that reveal the logic behind the discursive and legal system of anti-terrorism.

This work evolved in response to the various political and subjective tensions that accompanied the Argentine economic crisis, which peaked in 2001 and 2002. These include a profound negation of state institutions, the protagonism of autonomous social movements, and popular militancy and grass-roots organizing attached to aesthetic invention. Another important point of reference for these artists is their understanding of the period popularly dubbed “post-crises,” characterized by re-legitimation of the traditional political system, the repression and domestication of social movements and a turn towards a discourse of security. Described by its architects as a return to “normal capitalism,” this transformation has been hailed internationally—as well as by some sectors in Argentina—as a remarkable “recovery” and successful return to stability.

If, as Ruth Gilmore writes, “Crisis signals systemic social change whose outcome is determined through struggle,” the works in this exhibition trace the contours of this struggle over the past decade, up to the present. In doing so, they reject official representations of stability and development, defy the image of a kinder and gentler “normal” capitalism and interrogate the political theater through which these ideas are promoted. Dismantling the narrative of crisis and “recovery,” they instead reveal the conditions of stability for the crisis state, and what it costs in labor, terror and even life.

Click here to read more about the exhibition on the UAG website: http://universityartgallery.ucsd.edu

Click here to read more about the conference

Artists included in the exhibition

Ala Plástica is an NGO that has worked since 1991 on projects in which art, ecological regeneration and collective investigation play a primary role. The group’s activities often deal with ecological work, the conservation of native cultures and species, and the participatory recuperation of local economies and social tissue. Ala Plástica’s members and collaborators include artists, scientists, community organizations, other NGOs and researchers.

Eduardo Molinari is a multidisciplinary artist whose work centers on research through artistic methods and walking as an aesthetic practice. His l Archivo Caminante [The Walking Archive] is a meta-work that is both an archival collection he has, maintained since 2001, as well as the manifestation of his ongoing artistic-cum-research practice. This practice draws on varied epistemological frameworks and methodologies, including those associated with militant research, conceptual art, ethnography, post-colonial historiography, travel writing and psychogeography. El Camino Real, featured in this exhibition, is a diptych comprised of an installation that features documents drawn from the Archive and the book,El Libro Plateado y Real , appearing in its first English translation. In El Camino Real history unfolds in a non-linear and palimpsestic time that moves between the Southern Cone’s colonial history, Argentina’s hyper-neoliberalization in the 1990s and ensuing economic crash, and the potentiality of popular revolt and armed struggle seen in the country in the early 1970s. This work not only refigures a sense of national identity, but also proposes an especial understanding of the past — one that encompasses the unpredictable landscape of collective memory, fugitive events and experiences that have escaped the archival record, and the untapped potentialities still latent within them.

Etcétera… was formed in 1997 by a group of visual artists, poets, puppeteers, and actors. The group’s unique fusion of aggressive street theater, political critique, and direct-action protest, is equally marked by the group’s formative militancy within Argentina’s left human rights movement as it is the artists’ fealty to Surrealism. Beginning in the late 1990s, Etcétera… worked closely with the human rights group H.I.J.O.S. (Children for Identity and Justice Against Forgetting and Silence) in developing and popularizing escraches: popular exposure protests that are used to denounce unpunished perpetrators of state-sponsored terrorism, seeking a form of justice that is not beholden to the state’s legal and judicial institutions. Etcétera…’s particular style of surrealist street theater– sometimes grotesque, always irreverent – has played an important role in bringing visibility to unpunished acts of state violence while, at the same time, questioning rhetoric of victimization often emphasized in social justice struggles.

The Errorist International was founded by Etcétera… in 2005 as a response to the US-led “War on Terror” and the passage of international counter-terrorist legislation in Argentina. The Errorists stage situational performances to uncover the strategic operations of the state’s terrorism discourse and explore its repercussions in the media, language, and visual culture. They disseminate manifestoes, communiqués and videos about Errorism: a “practice and philosophy based on error as a way of life.” The Errorists’ works include performances in the midst of political demonstrations, unannounced street actions that target unwitting passersby (or even police), videos, photo-novels, poetic manifestoes and media interventions and hoaxes.

Grupo de Arte Callejero [Street Art Group]’s aim to “militate politically through art” is perhaps best exemplified in the way the group has worked with Argentina’s popular and left human rights movement since the 1990s, particularly in the organization and visibilization of escraches. One of GAC’s most visible contributions to the escraches are street signs that identify the locations of former concentration camps and signs and maps that lead demonstrators to the front doors of former military officers, complicit doctors and priests, and “economic genocidas”. With their maps, street signs, posters and anonymous interventions GAC creates a counter-mapping of the city — on that refuses the juridical and military obviation of both collective trauma and militancy. In the Argentine context, the way GAC inscribes symbols of state terror into spaces of the post-dictatorial present renders deeply ambivalent the official representation of the institutions of the neoliberal democratic state that has been consolidated against the violence of the past dictatorship.

Julian d’Angiolillo is a visual artist, filmaker and playwright whose work explores questions of urbanism, spatial practice, public space and memory. This exhibition features his recent feature-length film Hacerme Feriante [Become a Stallholder], along with documentation of its creation. The film is the product of d’Angiolillo’s intensive research on a massive informal market known as La Salada. Condemned by the European Union for violations of brand copyright laws, La Saladais the largest informal market of its kind in Latin America, attracting migrants from Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay and the Argentine countryside. D’Angiolillo’s film examines the coordinated efforts of stallholders, local bosses or caudillos, and visitors who open the fair in the middle of the night or pre-dawn hours twice weekly. Italso explores the ways in which the market is far more than a site of commerce, and is also a place for celebrations, religious ceremony and popular assemblies and a strategic field where the identity of immigrants and workers is reaffirmed.

Taller Popular de Serigrafía [The People's Screen-Printing Workshop]was born in 2002 in the context of the popular assembly movement in Buenos Aires. The collective worked closely with neighborhood assemblies and participated in myriad demonstrations organized by piquetero [picketer] movements and occupied factory workers. The artists worked by determining a popular struggle or action in which they would take part and then collectively developed a graphic image that would communicate the spirit of the struggle. They disseminated these images at demonstrations by screen-printing the image onto posters and attendees’ shirts in situ, using their portable printing table that was mounted in a shopping cart. The exhibition will feature posters and T-shirts from over 50 different actions the group realized between 2002 and 2006.

Iconoclasistas‘ projects in tactical media, “agit-pop” graphics and radical cartography all grow from the group’s understanding of communication as a political praxis. They create bold graphic works that articulate counter-hegemonic social imaginaries and aim to support popular left struggles. These images are just one part of an ongoing collective research practice through which they and their myriad collaborators generate representations of grass roots justice struggles throughout Latin America and synthesize and disseminate this information in such a way as promote consideration of actual and possible connections and broader resistance movements. Their collective mapping workshops bring together people from diverse social movements and communities to foment dialogue about local problematics, promote direct inquiries into the specific sites of conflict or struggle, and create visual representations of this collective knowledge.

La Tribu is an independent radio based in Buenos Aires. Their work for this exhibition is curated by the cooperative media conglomerate Diego de la Vega LLC.

The Archivo Provincial de la Memoria [Provincial Memory Archive] is a public institution that aims to give historic value and meaning to sites that are part of the history of state terrorism in the state of Córdoba, Argentina. Diego de la Vega LLC is a Mexican coin-operated media conglomerate that works under the secret agenda of “another world is possible ” with the goal of creating collective common goods while working in the logic of a globalized information economy. Diego de la Vega’s CEO, writer and media artist Fran Ilich, created a piece for the exhibition in collaboration with the Memory Archive that is based on a dialogue between Ilich and activists who work with the Archive and with the human rights organization H.I.J.O.S. Córdoba.

Jennifer Flores Sternad is a scholar and curator whose research focuses on militant and activist art, performance, and artistic practices developed within or in alignment with social movements. Since 2001 her work in these fields has included extensive research in Argentina, Brazil and Chile, as well as on Xicano/a and Latino/a art and theater in the U.S. Her texts have been published in books and academic journals in the US, Europe and Latin America, including Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization (NAi, 2011); Live Art in LA, 1970-1983 (with Suzanne Lacy, Routledge, 2011 forthcoming); Zona de Poesia Árida: Coletivos de Arte (Universidad de São Paulo, 2011 forthcoming), MEX/LA: Mexican Modernisms in Los Angeles (with Ricardo Bracho, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011 forthcoming); Haciendo Tiempo: Arte Radical, 1999-2004 (Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de Mexico, 2010); and the journals GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies; Contemporary Theatre Review; The Journal of American Drama and Theater and Interreview. She has directed and produced public art events in Argentina, Chile and California and she is co-founder with Fran Ilich of the media art/research project Collective Intelligence Agency. She holds a BA in Literature from Harvard, an MA in Art History from UCLA, and she is currently a doctoral candidate and MacCracken Fellow in American Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU.

Banner Image: Still from Hacerme Feriante, video, 2011 Julian d’Angiolillo

The Access Youth Academy at the 2011 Best in the West squash tournament

Students playing at the San Diego Squash Club

Access Youth Academy goals are to:
- Teach students to take responsibility for their actions and choices
- Help students appreciate and enjoy physical activity
- Develop students sense of good sportsmanship on and off the squash court
- Promote understanding and friendship between people of different backgrounds
- Engage students in service projects that help their community.

The program initially started with 18 students in grades 6th through 8th. This current academic year, 2009-2010, we have enrolled 40 students in grades 7th through 10th. The students attend The Preuss School, a charter school on the UCSD campus. The students will commit to the Access Youth Academy program 2-3 times per week for 3 hours per day. During this time they will be engaged in academic tutoring as well. The community service part of the program will be held on selected Saturdays. Some examples of community service projects include distributing food and clothing for homeless shelters, cooking and enjoying time with elderly, and playground and beach cleanups. All court time, squash instruction, tutoring, athletic equipment, transportation, and field trips are provided free of charge to Access Youth Academy team members. In return, the program requires of its participants regular attendance at practice and a commitment at all times to try hard, to respect fellow team members and to take school as seriously as sports.

To learn more about Access Youth Academy or to donate, please visit: www.accessyouthacademy.org

Students at the 2011 Best in the West squash tournament

Students at the 2011 Best in the West squash tournament

The End of the World at the Edge of the Earth.

Juli Carson’s bilingual book The Limits of Representation: Psychoanalysis and Critical Aesthetics (Buenos Aires: Letra Viva Press, 2011), considers the following questions: If there’s a Lacanian aesthetic in contemporary art, how does this practice incorporate post-structuralist theories by such thinkers as Roland Barthes or Jacques Ranciere? Would this “critical aesthetic” then deconstruct the dialectical conversation between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno? If so, what remains of the Avant-Garde in contemporary practice? The Limits of Representation examines these propositions through careful explication of “case study” artworks by Kelly Barrie, Steve Fagin, Andrea Geyer, Mary Kelly, Roberto Jacoby, Cristóbal Lehyt, Dorit Margreiter, Florian Pumhösl, Kerry Tribe and Dolores Zinny/Juan Maidagan.Many of these projects were featured in Carson’s curatorial program at UC Irvine’s University Art Galleries, which is committed to promoting an inter-generational dialogue between 60s/70s neo-avant-garde art and contemporary visual culture in its most expansive poetic form.

The End of the World at the Edge of the Earth is a film in progress by Juli Carson and Bruce Yonemoto, 2008 Creative Capital fellows. The film began with the poetic observation that two things were simultaneously growing in Argentina: 1) a glacier named Perito Moreno in Patagonia; and 2) a clinical psychoanalytic practice founded by Jacques Lacan. The film’s two main components are a time-lapse capture of Perito Moreno, which includes an original score by Mayo Thompson, and a contemporary restaging a 1966 Happening by the Argentine artist/critic Oscar Masotta, entitled Helicopter.The project elegantly combines Carson’s Lacanian research and Yonemoto’s filmic practice as an investigation into subjectivity, the avant-garde and cultural memory today.

Film Shoot, The End of the World at the Edge of the Earth, Buenos Aires, 2009.

About Juli Carson

Juli Carson received her PhD from M.I.T. in the History, Theory and Criticism of Art Program in the Department of Architecture. Currently, she is Associate Professor in the Studio Art Department at UC Irvine where she directs the Critical and Curatorial MFA Program and the University Art Galleries. She is author of Exile of the Imaginary: Politics, Aesthetics, Love (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2007) and curator of the archival exhibition accompanying Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 1998). Her essays on conceptual art and psychoanalysis have been published in Art Journal, Documents, October, Texte Zur Kunst and X-TRA, as well as in numerous international anthologies and exhibition catalogues, including those produced for the MAK in Vienna, the Arnolfini Gallery in London, the Whitworth Museum in Manchester, the steirischer herbst festival in Graz and the 54th Venice Biennale (Polish Pavilion). The Limits of Representation: Psychoanalysis and Critical Aesthetics (Buenos Aires: Letra Viva Press, 2011) is her most recent book.

About Bruce Yonemoto

Bruce Yonemoto’s work explores the intimate relationship between cinema and politics, illuminating the key role that visual culture plays in both defining and executing the colonization of non-Western cultures. Yonemoto’s work has been exhibited internationally at the St. Louis Art Museum, MO (2010); Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Forum, CA (2008); the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; and the Santa Monica Museum of Art, CA.His work has also been included in numerous biennials, including the Gwangju Biennale (2008), Corcoran Biennial (2002), Fukui International Video Biennale (1993), and the Whitney Biennial (1993, 1987). In 1999, the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles presented a retrospective exhibition of Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s work. Other exhibitions include California Video: Artists and Histories at the Getty Center, Los Angeles (2008); Los Angeles 1955-1986, Pompidou Center, Paris (2007); Exile of the Imaginary, Generali Foundation, Vienna, Austria (2007).

This project is a two-stage collaboration between artists Tang Maohong, Zhang Ding and Sun Xun. The first stage will directly affect the second stage; the creation process is full of uncertainty.

The first stage started from September 3rd,2011. Six 7m black Chinese characters – “ 你准备 好了吗” (literally means “Are you ready”) were put on four walls of the exhibition hall. It is a question from three artists as well as the dialogue with audience. After the first stage, project enters its second stage. Artists create on site in exhibition, and the creation process is open to public. Base on the huge characters, three artists return to their own creation.

During the second stage, Tang Maohong’s painting works – “Thinking sadness in front of you”, Zhang Ding’s installation work – “Compartment”, and Sun Xun’s mural with sculpture and painting on paper – “March 18th Park” will be public. The three art works are independent but with internal relations. Artists’ communication and their balance searching will be presented in exhibition.

Visit ShanghART’s website for more information: www.shanghart.com

Tang Maohong was born in 1975. Recent exhibitions include Singapore Biennale 2006: Belief (Singapore, 2006), Orchid Finger, ShanghART H-Space (Shanghai, 2006), Sunday – Tang Maohong’s Solo Exhibition, Longhua Lu (Shanghai, 2006), A Lot of Ash – A Lot of Dust, BizArt, (Shanghai, 2005) and Asian Traffic Shanghai: Magnetism – Suspension, Zendai Museum of Modern Art (Shanghai, 2005).

Sun Xun was born in 1980 in Fuxin in Liaoning province, China. He currently lives and works in Beijing. He graduated in 2005 from the Print-making Department of the China Academy of Fine Arts. In 2006 he established π Animation Studio. During 2010 he has received several notable awards including the “Chinese Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA Best Young Artist)” and “Taiwan Contemporary Art Link Young Art Award”. Recent solo exhibitions include: Clown’s Revolution, Holland Animation Festival, Center Museum, Utrecht, Netherlands (2010); 21KE, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2010); The Soul of Time, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel, Switzerland (2010); Animals, Max Protetch Gallery, New York, U.S.A (2009); People’s Republic of Zoo, University of Essex Gallery, U.K.(2009); His Story, ShanghART H-Space, Shanghai (2009); The New China, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, U.S.A(2008); etc. Recent group exhibitions include: By Day By Night or Some (Special) Things a Museum Can Do, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2010); China Power Station – Part 3, Pinacoteca Agnelli, Torino, Italy (2010); Aichi Tiennale 2010, Aichi, Japan (2010); 2009 Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria; etc.

Zhang Ding was born in 1980 in Gansu. He resides and works in Shanghai. He graduated from North West Minority University, Oil Painting Department in 2003. He studied at China Academy of Fine Arts, New Media Art from 2003 to 2004. Recent exhibitions include Big City and A Lot of Ash – A Lot of Dust, BizArt Center (Shanghai, 2005) and First International Biennale of Contemporary Chinese Art: MC1 (Montpellier, 2005).

Banner Image: Tang Maohong, TMH_0316: melancholy, Acrylic on canvas, 2011

Post Image: Gallery installation image

After the resounding success of his first exhibition at Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art in 2006, the foundation is dedicating a second major solo exhibition to the renowned artist and filmmaker Yang Fudong, one of the most important artists yet to emerge in contemporary China. It presents three new works: Fifth Night, 2010; One half of August, 2011; Ye Jiang (The night man cometh), 2011.

Fifth Night, a video-installation composed of seven synchronized projections, is shot supposedly in the streets of Shanghai’s old town at night, revealing some commotion in which carriages, rickshaws and vintage cars are driven. A stage has been built and a tramcar is being frantically repaired. Unrelated characters perform their own activities, some engaged, others bored as if awaiting some event, all lack any interest in or compassion for one another. Yang Fudong uses 35-mm cameras to film the same scenes from different angles, with variations of scale and depth of field. This highlights a character’s simplest action or subtle expression so that what a viewer might perceive as separate instances are actually all part of a single scene. As in most of Yang Fudong’s works, all is left open-ended, with no beginning or end. Without conclusion, the search for spiritual life continues.

One half of August is an eight-screen, black-and-white, HD video installation, for which Yang Fudong projects scenes from earlier works (particularly from Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest) onto architectural elements, props, structures and objects built for the purpose. He also includes artefacts, uses light, and inverts external space. This creates new realities that challenge one’s vision and mind, and expands our understanding of the world. This first derivative of Yang Fudong films, almost an attempt at three-dimensionality, poses the question: Am I watching a film or a film of a film? Issues of the subconscious, reality and dream are also clearly present. The title A half of August refers to the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, which is about rites, tradition, art, poetry, everything that puts human beings to the fore. Usually starting on the 15th of the eighth Chinese lunar month, in 2011 the festival began on 12 September, the launch date of Yang Fudong’s exhibition at Parasol unit. Yang Fudong highlights with his beautiful title a fine collaboration with Parasol unit and his second exhibition there.

The single-screen work, Ye Jiang (The night man cometh) unfolds in a frozen winter landscape. At first one might try to read the film as a linear narrative, but as images succeed one another it becomes clear that Yang Fudong is once more questioning the destiny of man. In it a wounded and forlorn warrior is seen after a battle, apparently now questioning his path in life. In this dramatic and hyper-realist film, three ghost-like characters appear to personify the chaos of feelings and thoughts that surface and clash within the warrior’s heart and mind as he swings from enthusiasm and happiness to disappointment, grief and despair, thus revealing what takes place in a man who is required to demonstrate strength and courage in times of war and crisis.

Born in 1971 in Beijing, Yang Fudong lives and works in Shanghai. Recent exhibitions include Marion Goodman Gallery, Paris, France, (2011) and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, Australia, (2011). Other one-person exhibitions include National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece, (2010); Hara Museum, Tokyo, Japan, (2009); Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, USA, (2009); MuHKA, Antwerp, Belgium, (2009); Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China (2009).

To read more about this exhibition visit: www.e-flux.com/shows/view/10116 and www.parasol-unit.org

Image: Yang Fudong, “Ye Jiang (The night man cometh),” 2011, 35mm film transferred to HD, 1 screen, Black and white, 19′21”