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27/6/2015

Current

Himalayas Art Museum (Zendai Himalayas Center), Shanghai

The present is the only moment that ever matters. Under this apparent simplicity, the past and the future are rescinded and in their wake only this perpetually cogent moment is perceived and acknowledged.

Playing off its Chinese title不合时宜 (Untimely) and drawing upon Roland Barthes succinct aphorism “The contemporary is the untimely”, CURRENT questions the political, social and economic discourses that contest this present moment and its apparition as culture.

Immersed in the excessive flow of money, goods and people that constitute the inflating transnational bubble, the ‘contemporary’ revokes the multiplicity of history in favour of a single all encompassing image;now. With this grandiose claim that only this moment is essential, the ‘contemporary’ acts as the crucial fiction for indexing how culture is valued, exchanged and consumed. And it is this fiction that privileges the ‘contemporary’ as the only ground capable of legitimising the broad spectrum of theoretical positions and critical observations determining what is relevant and of course, valuable.

In navigating the flux of the transnational, the ‘contemporary’ offers an affective register for defining a fiction of unity. This is also inscribed in the transnational perception of Chinese contemporary art. After exploding onto the international scene, Chinese contemporary art transmogrified from a plurality of practices into an identifiable ‘aesthetic regime’ by the use of ‘contemporary’ as its stabilising prefix. Through showing contemporary artworks from Scotland in China, CURRENT brings this fictive function of the contemporary into sharp relief.

To provoke a sustained critique on the ‘contemporary’, CURRENT holds these two images of the ‘contemporary’ in proximity, revealing in the words of Barthes, an ‘untimely’ and displaced temporality. Un-anchored from their social and cultural context, these two iterations of the ‘contemporary’ are remediated under the hypothetical universality of the transnational. In this geographical and discursive move, CURRENTchallenges how the ‘contemporary’ functions and ascribes legitimacy.

Showcasing artworks by artists of different generations, CURRENT emphasise the complexity of practices thriving in Scotland. Defined by originality and risk-taking this complexity resists, subverts and transforms how art and culture are stereotypically seen, valued and understood on the international stage.

Including solo exhibitions by Bruce McLean, Poster Club (Anne-Marie Copestake, Charlie Hammond, Tom OSullivan, Nicolas Party, Ciara Phillips and Michael Stumpf), Edgar Schmitz, Ross Sinclair, Lucy Skaer and Corin Sworn, CURRENT also plan to present seminal British Artists’ Video works of the 1970s & 1980s from the REWIND research project at DJCAD and a moving image screening programme of emerging artists’ works from Scotland.

Image: invitation

Press Contact: xian.chen@himalayasmuseum.org

Sun 28 June 2015

Himalayas Art Museum
896, Yinghua Road, Shanghai
10:00-18:00 Tuesdays-Sundays

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