calendario eventi  :: 

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10/11/2010

The Third Party

Platform China, Beijing

Featuring:
1. How to Be Alone (or Nowhere else am I safe from the question: why here?) | Nov.11 – Nov. 30, 2010
2. The Stranger | Dec. 9 – Dec. 27, 2010
3. The Third Party | Jan. 7 – Jan. 24, 2011

Curated by Beatrice Leanza

Organized by Platform China in collaboration with BAO Atelier

“And what would art have to do with this? What would it give to be seen? Cause to be seen? Let us see? Let us cause to be seen? Or let itself be shown?”
Jacques Derrida – The Truth in Painting

The Third Party is an exhibition conceived to unfold in three consecutive sessions in Platform China project space. Each approximately lasting twenty days, the three moments of this show are devised to disclose their conceptual and thematic associations as in a chain‐reaction, where the individual frameworks are determined by the critical inputs presented within a preceding one.
The Third Party explores the shaping relationships between narrative and aesthetic objects to foreground an inquiry in the realm of the ‘ordinary’ specific to the Chinese context. It does so by mobilizing overarching frames of reference and critique currently at play, be those aesthetic or historical, through three analytical environments tackling respectively issues of self­historicization, witnessing/archiving and collaboration. The progressive movement of the show somehow attends to the patterns of identification inherent in the day‐to‐day business of learning and communicating of and through our bodies, spaces, feelings as we build an understanding of reality and ultimately our position within it. The ‘ordinary’ is here awakened to create a momentous connection between aesthetic or artistic acts and the spatial and social conventions characteristic of the local environment as they meet in a dynamic arena of indescribable collusion, an intermediate dimension lingering between art and life in a “luxurious confusion of sense and sensation, of ideas and somatic registering” (Ben Highmore, “Ordinary Lives”). The Third Party focuses on the structures of narration deployed throughout the process of observing, reflecting on the world around us while simultaneously creating it, drifting along the pathways of subjectification and participation in a continuous commitment to “a world in solution (and dissolution), a commitment to the heuristic, prespecialized gestalt of life” (B. Highmore).

By juxtaposing these acts of description as represented in the work of a group of artists from across the country, the three portions of the exhibition emplace three different possibilities of narrative articulation. From the most intimate and solipsistic to the collective and participatory, they intend to brake off the circuit of signification and knowledge between work and world, and rather expose the processes by which meaning is produced and attributed.

The Third Party therefore concerns itself with matters of mapping, the tracing of patterns of both presence and absence and the ideological constitution of subjects.

The exhibition is visually designed to present the works of the individual artists as self‐pronounced archival displays. While each act features a different group of artists, some of the works will varyingly evolve in the course of the three months or come to completion at an arbitrary moment in time.

Responsive to the idea of the exhibition as a ‘field report’, one that escapes the structural preordering of objectifying analysis, a special architectural installation called The Beehive has been devised by Li Naihan. Constituted by units of hexagonal cardboard boxes variously repurposed to be adopted and adapted according to the works, the Beehive creates a deceptive information system that allows for the temporary arrangement of both things and the ‘emotional ecologies’ attached to them. It allows the works to drift in their own visual and material reality while making it possible for us to see them as disjunctions of a larger contextual narrative.

It is with this purpose in mind that the exhibition is presented as product and staging of dialogue by both the curator and Platform China organizers; to forge a space where differing critical positions can find ‘place’ for constructive confrontation, to prompt a commitment with whatever the contemporary doubtless offers itself to be – simultaneously an individual and collective creation.

This project continues an ongoing series of practical and theoretical investigations initiated by the curator Beatrice Leanza, which take the ‘question of space’ at their heart to evaluate its implication with processes of artistic production and representation that inform, both historically and conceptually, specific cultural perception of the contemporary. Titled “States of Distraction” this series of projects particularly focuses on the interrelation between spatiality and artistic practices from contemporary Asia. It started in November 2009 with the group exhibition “Emporium – A New Common Sense of Space”, presented in Milano’s Da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology with 27 artists, collectives and independently‐run art spaces from China, Korea and Japan.

Act 1:HOW TO BE ALONE
(or nowhere else am i safe from the question: why here?)
November 11 – 30, 2010

Participating artists: Gao Mingyan, Jia Aili, Jin Shan, Jin Shi, Ho Elaine W., Hu Xiangqian, Hu Xiaoyuan, Li Jinghu, Li Naihan, Li Ming, Li Mu, Liang Shuo, Qiu Xiaofei, Sun Xun, Wang Wei, Yan Jun, Yang Xinguang, Zhang Enli, Zhao Yao, Zhou Yilun.

“Perhaps one of the strongest models of presumed disjunction between everyday life and art, [...] is presented in the invisible social space of reading and writing, a space defined temporally and spatially as outside and above the quotidian” (Susan Stewart, “On Longing”).
With no precise point of origin, this journey through the regions of the ordinary draws itself by all manners of distantiation, through acts of arbitrary undoing or unframing of the seemingly perpetual ‘ongoingness’ of the real world.

Like the book written by Jonathan Frenzen from which it takes its title, the exhibition How to Be Alone is not a work of fiction. The ‘chapters’ that constitute it establish connections with the ‘local particulars’ of life in the present in the shape of very personal, provisional solutions or supplementary offerings to its spectacular overabundance of images, hegemonizing ideologies and policing strategies of communal existence. As the realm of the social grows overpopulated with the diversification of values and increasingly fractured throughout its cultural ephemera and material networks, ever more intricate and less tangible become the spaces for active participation, more subtle, immediate and intimate our strategies to survive within.

This exhibition wishes to highlight how, with no sense of exceptionalism, local artists respond to the demands of intellectual integrity by way of reconciling themselves and the outside world with reiterated acts of self‐positioning, exercised as forms of solipsistic performances that both distance and engage their cultural surrounding.

This first exhibition as well as, we shall see, its second and third iteration, predicate themselves on a simple equation: one that matters the relationship between self and other, the creation of personal, isolated worlds that at the same time concern ‘me’ and ‘us’ as they provide a visual and material repository of contemporary history supplementary to the one offered in the public discourse of master narratives . It is ultimately, in the words of Frenzen, “the problem of preserving individuality and complexity in a noisy and distracting mass culture: the question of how to be alone”.

The works presented in How to Be Alone are differently accompanied by texts and documentation provided by the artists whenever they felt it compelling to tighten the lyrical hyphen subtending the relationship between self and (‐) history, and therefore self and work.

In the works here presented ‘ordinariness’ manifests itself both as material plenty in the range of used, found or discarded objects, personal mementos and paraphernalia, familiar places and situations, as well as in the immaterial guise of memory, habit and routine, which the artists often reference or resort to with the repetition of actions and the reiteration of gestures wherein a circuit of both liberation and erasure of the self is drawn. Like a new generation of international artists that find themselves willing to engage the reality of the ‘world‐at‐large’, those included in this exhibition are formulating new ways to deal with the space of art and social action by assuming a position of open, dynamic marginality.
In this type of psychological portraiture can be found a manifestation of the artist’s space of self‐preservation. Eccentric and at times unintelligible, the visual experience that constitutes these works is the very place of artistic agency, where what is to be seen is not in the document of the represented image but in the logic tension it denotes in revealing itself as an object of interior consumption. “That is why – arguments Boris Groys – contemporary art is less a production of individual artworks, than it is a manifestation of an individual decision to include or exclude things and images that circulate anonymously in our world, to give them another context or to deny it to them.” All of the works, or systems of ideas and objects, in How to Be Alone have been re‐thought, re‐installed anew to the simple purpose of making such space of decision‐making, that is the very domain of the artwork and therefore what it puts to public consumption, more, or less in some cases, obvious.

Artists Wang Wei, Zhang Enli and Elaine W. Ho have realized projects especially for the show, while The Beehive, a special architectural installation designed by Li Naihan, will be rearranged and repurposed during the development of the entire show, along its three consecutive acts.

For Inquiries please contact:
Claudia Albertini claudia@platformchina.org

Opening: November 11, 2010 – 5 pm

Platform China
Contemporary Art Institute
Add: East End Art Zone A, No. 319‐1 Caochangdi Village, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing

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