Poetics of Inquiry: How to Stay with Trouble
ACT Gallery, MIT, Cambridge
Artist
Ishraki Kazi
Curator
Chiarina Chen
Poetics of Inquiry: How to Stay with Trouble is a behavioral-based solo exhibition by artist Ishraki Kazi. Activated by a series of durational performances, the show is set as a tentacular experiment on the inquiries of how our knowledge system may be limited and how we can relate with others. Audiences will be invited to sign up for one-on-one sessions to explore different ‘chapters’ with the artist, engaging with various scenarios that ignite dialogues and interactions with multi-others from human to animal and microbial entities.
The show questions the reductionist approaches to science as well as binary divisions between mind and body, subject and object, self and other, and wishes to raise awareness of how we are fundamentally entangled with other beings, both human and non-human.
Through immersive interactions and meditative threads, Ishraki encourages audiences to engage, not escape, the trouble and challenging issues of our time while re-imagining a holistic land of kin-making embedded with empathy and care.
Connelly Theater, New York
Cyborg Foundation
New York University
Director/Curator
Chiarina Chen
Artists
Moon Ribas, Closca, Lizzy DaVita, Nathaniel Flagg, Bryson Rand, Kate Ruggieri
Featured Musicians
Emilie Weibel, Jason Nazary
Stage Manager
Will Jennings
Sound Tech
Jason Zinx
Made Possible
Negation International
Cyborg Foundation
Posthuman Research Group, NYU
As technology is intimately interwoven into our lives, Donna Haraway once claimed that we are all "chimeras" and has become the default in the current stage. Perhaps a more urgent question calls for the HOW. How do we situate ourselves in the paradigm beyond humanism? And how do we regain the vitality in engaging the shifting world in the form of hybrid?
Grounded upon shared exhaustion and disconnection, Magic Back to Town to gathers cyborg artist Moon Ribas, scenographer Closca, and musicians Emilie Weibel and Jason Nazary to build a theatrical production — a collaborative journey exploring relations among humans, technology, and nature. Unlike technology-centered or future-driven 'demos,' we strive to ‘summon magic'’
At the scene, audiences were also invited to send sound recordings regarding their stories of anxiety or exhaustion, which were remixed and synced with live seismic data, weaving into the performance.
Program
7:00 PM
Grand Opening
7:10 – 7: 25
Prelude: The Voice of Anxiety
7:25 – 7:40
Waiting for Earthquakes
7:40 – 8:10
Monologue: Return
8:10 – 8:25
Intermezzo
8:25 – 9:00
The Earth-beat
Collecting Anxiety Series
Multi Venues, New York City and Worldwide
Curator:
Chiarina Chen
Artists:
Vargas-Suarez Universal, Barry Rosenthal, Wayne Liu, Lizzy Devita, Chris Devita, Mark Bleakley
Featured Musicians:
Stephen Barber, Bob Malach, Emilie Weibel, Ari Finkel, Nikhil Shah
"becoming-nomadic marks the transformation of the pain of loss into an active production of multiple forms of belongings. Here what once is lost in the fixed pattern has proceeded in a multiple rhizomatic manner that transcends the bilateralism of identity structure.”
— Édouard Glissant
Collecting Anxiety is a socio-interactive series that explore contemporary psycho-landscapes and interconnectedness. It rejects the Cartesian dichotomous views of mind and body and intends to foreground the relational discourses in an affirmative manner.
In a culture that worships perfection and strength while de-valuing imperfection and vulnerability; pursues individual success while neglecting collective care, we are exhausted, feeling physically and emotionally drained to cope with the fast-moving and cynically competitive world. "we are tired of something," as Deleuze once put it, "but exhausted by nothing."
What do anxiety, pain, and vulnerability really mean to us? What creative forces and connective bonds can they generate? How can curatorial practice produce discourses and care?
It is with these concerns we invite people worldwide to send their ‘anxiety’ to us via sound recordings or fragments of texts. People can send messages whenever they feel frustrated, anxious, or depressed based on their definitions of anxiety. Meanwhile, we invite artists from multi-disciplinary backgrounds to create artworks based on collected sound data. This way, we hope to build an open safe space that allows personal voices and collective stories to interlink.
Throughout the year, artists have transformed the collected sound of 'anxiety' into a series of commissioned works, leading to exhibitions and site-specific performances. Each show explored one theme, zooming in on specific perspectives. In New York's first season, the collected digital community has traveled from downtown Manhattan to Manhattan Bridge, Soho, and landed in the Church of Epiphany in the Upper East Side. Sound artist Emilie Weibel, Ari Finkel, and Nikhil Shah live-performed music based on collected sound-texts. Artist Wayne Liu created four installations on decay, city nostalgia, and mobility. Photographer Barry Rosenthal sheds light on the blurred boundary between waste and beauty with a set of photography-installations. Lizzy De Vita responded to the tension of relationships, loss, identity, and negotiations through a two-hour spatial sculpture piece in collaboration with Chris De Vita and Mark Bleakly. Vargas-Suarez and composer Stephen Barber co-made From Subsonic to Supersonic, realized in the form of immersive sound installation. It invited the audience on a sonic loop that explored the vulnerability of human beings, the cycle of nature, and the universe.
Is This Intimacy?
University of Applied Arts Vienna Krinzinger Projekte Vienna
Curators:
Anna Mikaela Ekstrand, Carlota Mir, Chiarina Chen, Katrina Longo, Lina Romanukha, Valeria Schiller
Artists:
Alfredo Ledesma Quintana, Anna Lerchbaumer, Anne-Clara Stahl, Bernadette Anzengruber, Darja Shatalova, Eva Rybářová, Laura Stoll, Maximiliane Leni Armann, Mona Radziabari, Paula Flores, Veronika Abigail Beringer
Is This Intimacy? is a collective exploration of the shifting boundaries and ambiguities of intimacy in our hypermediated present.
The exhibition emerges from the exchanges, desires and experiences of a group of millennial artists and curators from across the globe. Is This Intimacy? borrows its title from a meme that circulated heavily online in 2018, whose original image features the protagonist of a 1990s Japanese anime TV series, The Brave Fighter of Sun Fighbird, an android who mistakes a butterfly for a pigeon, asking himself ‘Is this a pigeon?’ Transformed into a viral meme that turned the original question into a thousand others, (‘Is this a therapist?’ / ‘Is this a cure to my lifelong depression?’/ ‘Is this hell?’ ‘Is this my life?’ / ‘Is this a hacker?’) the image and its transformations illustrate a viral, current state of emotional confusion globally.
How will future art historians treat our digital relations? Probably similar to letters and soap boxes of eras bygone. A subtle reference to the seminal 1956 exhibition This Is Tomorrow, which marked the heyday of late Western capitalism through its relationship to pop culture, Is this Intimacy? is an exercise in translation of some of its key methods, concerns and consequences into the era of global hypercommunication.
Understanding translation as “the ultimate intimate act”, as Gayatri Spivak states in The Politics of Translation, the exhibition explores the impact of technology on emotional life today. Where Pop Art talked about TV soap operas, cheap furniture, canned soup and the techno-suburban housewife, the showcased artists address our relationship to an ambivalent affective and political environment. Old ideas and new prosthetic technologies, social networks and data clouds coexist, radically blurring previous distinctions of private vs public space. If the meaning of intimacy is ‘to understand oneself, deeply’, as Giovanni Frazzetto recently wrote, how can we become intimate with ourselves in this context? How do we seek, produce, avoid, negotiate and sustain intimacy in an environment dominated by endless flows of data, affective capital and ‘successful’, public images of intimacy?
Wasteland of the Future
Shanghai Himalayas Museum, Department of Philosophy, Fudan University
Navy Yard, Brooklyn
Curator:
Chiarina Chen
Artists:
Wiena Lin, Naomi Campbell
Featured Composer:
Shiuan Chang
Coordinator: Xiaojing Chen
Production Engineer: Lao Yuan
Tech Support: Ming Chen
Graphic Design: Wen Zi
Wasteland of Future is a three-part series draw attention to the relationship between the electronic medium and people’s urban existence. In an era of explosive informational technology, over 40-million-ton electronic waste is produced every year. And under the surface of such massive E-waste production, informational waste and anxiety are constantly generated via social networking and consumerist machine.
The project thus sheds light on the transmissive interconnections among technology, human perception, and sustainability, and it wishes to raise discussions on waste, the human community, and global justice.
The exhibition was showcased in Navy Yard, New York, Shanghai Himalayas Museum and School of Philosophy, Fudan University. Through interactive exhibiting methods, the audience not only witnesses the electronic recycling but also directly participates in the hands-on de-constructing and transforming of the collected waste.
Impermanence
Serpentine ART
Curator:
Chiarina Chen
Artists:
Guillaume Hebert
Impermanence is a solo exhibition of artist Guillaume Hebert.
Hebert is more of a painter than a photographer. In his own words, he does not want to be limited by the definition of photography as a medium. For him, photography is a continuation of painting, and the two are a continuous whole. He is like someone who has traveled through time from the 19th century, wandering around different countries, gazing at landscapes, and searching for the sublime in the lost spiritual world.
There is a solemnity in Hebert's work that is reminiscent of classical painting. And this kind of painterly quality is precisely the result of his meticulous processing and polishing of the images. In his series of photographs of the sea, Ji Yong uses different timing techniques to create a layered effect and a grainy texture that resembles wax paintings. In his series of photographs of mountains, Ji Yong blends the mountains he has photographed with the works of 19th-century romantic painters like William Turner, and through careful processing that takes an average of 8-20 hours per image, he blends the two seamlessly, rejecting any hint of collage. Viewers need to approach the works and observe them carefully to discover the fusion and transformation within them.
At first glance, the works on display appear to be still landscapes, but they are not the "stills" of traditional photography or the capture of a moment. Hebert is actually delineating a continuous flow, a reflection of his profound inner nature. He uses an almost rigorous "painting" process to extend the captured moment in time and space constantly--the motion does not stop, the time does not dissolve, and photography and painting interchange with each other. The layers of shadows and the flickering grains of light not only enhance the painterly texture but also prolong the viewer's gaze, allowing them to experience tranquility.
In the city, where people are separated from nature, the scarcity of attention and the exhaustion of the mind often stifle people's thinking and perception. Ji Yong's exhibition series not only brings reflections on industrial society and yearnings for nature but perhaps also a channel. It allows people who pass through the city to regain their concentration and gaze and to imagine nature.
As the Japanese photographer Minoru Hosoeda once said while taking photos in Alaska, "Maybe we cannot come here in person, but as long as nature is still here, we can depict an endless nature in our consciousness, and such nature is invaluable."
This is precisely what can be felt in front of this series of works. Perhaps we cannot separate ourselves, cannot immediately go there, but what's essential is to awaken the nature within us and to reach out and touch the infinite."