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Xu Zhen

徐震
Eternity

Xu Zhen is one of the most interesting and promising artists working in China today. An irreverent artist with a voracious appetite for global information and a unique ability to produce work across multiple platforms and media.Xu Zhen is a conceptual artist whose work often takes the form of provocative sculptures, installations and interventions that confront sociopolitical taboos in contemporary China and freely manipulate western expectations of Chinese art and commerce.

Gustav Deutsch

Shirley
Visions of reality
FILE FESTIVAL
Shirley is a woman in America in the 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s, and early ‘60s. A woman who would like to influence the course of history with her professional and socio-political involvement. A woman who does not accept the reality of the Depression years, WWII, the McCarthy era, race conflicts and civil rights campaigns as given but rather as generated and adjustable.
Edward Hopper movie

Jiabao Li

TransVision
Through three perceptual machines, TransVision questions the habitual ways in which we interpret and understand the visual world intervened by digital media, and how technology mediates the way we perceive reality. We have observed an increase in allergies and intolerances in modern society. Hypersensitivities are emerging not only medically but also mentally. Digital media reinforce people’s tendency to overreact through the viral spread of information and amplification of opinions, making us hypersensitive to our sociopolitical environment. By creating an artificial allergy to the color red, this machine manifests the nonsensical hypersensitivity created by digital media. In nocebo mode, red expands, which is similar to social medias amplification effect; in placebo mode, red shrinks, like our filtered communication landscape where we can unfollow people with different opinions.

Shu Lea Cheang

Avatar of the artist
Taiwan in Venice 2019
“For those who don’t know her, Shu Lea Cheang is a figure of Net art and the cyberfeminist movement that emerged in the 1990s. Living in New York at the time, she was also an active member of the activist video collective Paper Tiger Television (as was French filmmaker Nathalie Magnan). Since then, Cheang’s work has dealt with “concerns including sex, futures, gender, ecology, money, media, and food [to] encompass film, installation, online work, social processes, and direct intervention in the sociopolitical, technical and aesthetic systems, and the imaginaries which co-compose them,” writes Matthew Fuller

Rothschild Eva

Cages
Rothschild’s practice involves both conceptual and socio-political ideas alongside traditional approaches to making sculpture. Through an investigation into form and materiality, her works balance, stack, wrap and knot materials around geometric shapes and structures – such materials that often appear to transcend their physical limitations, hover between representation, symbolism and actual form. By deliberately destabilizing physical and visual characteristics in her work, Rothschild not only questions the aesthetics of art, in particular minimalism, but also those of belief in social liberation and spiritual movements.

Marcius Galan

Empate
Marcius Galan explores the metaphorical capacities of space and our relation to it through his wide- ranging practice which includes installation, sculpture, photography and video. With a recognisably minimal aesthetic, Galan employs abstract geometry to delineate the political and social implications of his chosen environments, deconstructing the codes of objects established through everyday use. Whilst these configurations are always executed with graphic simplicity, Galan’s works are in fact complex material experiments that interrogate the functions, limits and frontiers of space and by extension, the socio-political systems which reside therein

Rowan Smith

dot matrix loop
Rowan Smith’s work takes the form of a multidisciplinary semiotic investigation into the ways in which cultural signs and signifiers can be read as artefacts. He examines how the meaning embedded in these artefacts fluctuates (and frequently deteriorates) in relation to ever-shifting sociopolitical contexts; often assuming a self-critical position which responds to his locality.

Didier Faustino

ДИДЬЕ ФАУСТИНО
דידייה פאוסטינו
ディディエ·ファウスティーノ
迪迪埃·福斯蒂诺
ASSWALL

Born in 1968, Didier Faustino lives and works between Paris and Lisbon. Faustino’s work reciprocally summons up art from architecture and architecture from art, indistinctly using genres in a way that summarizes an ethical and political attitude about the conditions for constructing a place in the socio-cultural fabric of the city. Spaces, buildings and objects show themselves to be platforms for the intersection of the individual body and the collective body in their use.

Ivan Navarro

Reality Show
The artist is known for the union between the neon and fluorescent and socio-political messages. His minimalist and modern sculptures and installations are guided by sharp social and political criticism, which has its origin in the artist personal history – that was born amid the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, in Santiago, in the 1970s. The dictator used to adopt, among other absurd practices, power cut as a way to impose curfews on people. A light to control the masses is a memory of Iván Navarro childhood and eventually became the major subject of his work.

didier faustino

ДИДЬЕ ФАУСТИНО
דידייה פאוסטינו
ディディエ·ファウスティーノ
迪迪埃·福斯蒂诺
vortex populi

Faustino’s work reciprocally summons up art from architecture and architecture from art, indistinctly using genres in a way that summarizes an ethical and political attitude about the conditions for constructing a place in the socio-cultural fabric of the city. Spaces, buildings and objects show themselves to be platforms for the intersection of the individual body and the collective body in their use.

WIM VANDEKEYBUS & ULTIMA VEZ

MENSKE

Even the standing room only tickets have sold out, and the raging mass of disappointed kids looks like they may start a riot: the atmosphere before Ultima Vez’s performance is akin to a rock concert. Choreographer superstar Wim Vandekeybus’s company has toured the world with their trademark vocabulary of acrobatic, extreme, often violent movement, soaked in multimedia and energetic music. Menske (meaning approximately ‘little human’), their latest work, has all the typical flaws and qualities of classic Vandekeybus. On the conservative end of political intervention, Menske is an explosive concoction of brash statements about the state of the world today, a sequence of rapidly revolving scenes of conflicting logic: intimist, blockbuster, desperate, hysterical. The broad impression is not so much of a sociological portrait, but of a very personal anguish being exorcised right in front of us, as if Vandekeybus is constantly switching format in search of eloquence. Visually, it is stunning, filmic: a slum society falling apart through guerrilla warfare, in which girls handily assume the role of living, moving weapons. A woman descends into madness in an oneiric hospital, led by a costumed and masked group sharpening knives in rhythmic unison. A traumatised figure wanders the city ruins dictating a lamenting letter to invisible ‘Pablo.’ Men hoist a woman on a pole her whole body flapping like a flag. “It’s too much!” intrudes a stage hand, “Too much smoke, too much noise, too much everything!” And the scene responsively changes to a quiet soliloquy. At which point, however, does pure mimesis become complicit with the physical and psychological violence it strives to condemn? Unable to find its way out of visual shock, Menske never resolves into anything more than a loud admission of powerlessness.

HAUS-RUCKER-CO

하우스-루커-코
是由豪斯拉克科
“Climate Capsules: Means of Surviving Disaster”

In view of the advancing climate change, the exhibition “Climate Capsules: Means of Surviving Disaster” at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg poses the question: “How do we want to live in the future?” and draws attention to the socio-political consequences of coexistence under new climatic conditions. In view of the fact that the politicians are hesitant to enforce strict measures for climate protection and the citizens very sluggish about changing their habits, the change appears inevitable. The world community is accordingly confronted with the challenge of investigating various possible means of adapting to the climate change. This exhibition is the first to bring together historical and current climate-related models, concepts, strategies, experiments and utopias from the areas of design, art, architecture and urban development – pursuing not the aim of stopping the climate change, but envisioning means of surviving after disaster has struck. More than twenty-five mobile, temporary and urban capsules intended to make human life possible independently of the surrounding climatic conditions will be on view – from floating cities and body capsules to concepts for fertilizing sea water or injecting the stratosphere with sulphur. A symposium, film programme, readings, performances and workshops will revolve around the interplay between design processes and political factors such as migration, border politics and resource conflicts, and investigate the consequences for social and cultural partitioning and exclusion.