Date:
22 March - 8 May 2016
Location:
Guangdong Times Museum
Co-curated by Patrick D. Flores (The Philippines) and Anca Verona Mihuleţ (Romania)
Common is the notion that the south lies at the opposite of north and that the north is supposedly ascendant, more prone to power, and closer to the imagined center. The south is cast as the peripheral and the dispossessed and that it gathers at the perceived fringes of province on a map of asymmetries. Such a curious psychogeographical,or geopolitical, imagination yields another antinomy: the west and the east, bearing more or less equivalent valences as north and south. This procedure of organizing the world reduces the latter into polarities and verticalities, the west is modern and everywhere yet the east is timeless and afar. The situation where the south and the east cohere to form the coordinate of the southeast is exceptional. It is possibly a double negation: not north, not west. And as such, it is a productive locus: it is not the center, twice.
Commencing from a specific geography and a state of mind to generate a certain way of observing and understanding locality, the exhibition South by Southeast. A Further Surface discusses the spectral idea of artistic initiative through the lens of materiality and reciprocity as poignant and also resolute stances. The body of works presented in the exhibition centers on “Southeast” as a trope to understand the world today. The sociopolitical tensions in Southeast Asia and Southeast Europe have informed the art works produced in these regions, in the same way that certain prominent ideas nurtured in this artistic environment have raised questions that would shape social policies at a global level — like the interpretation of history, the mediation of archives, or the importance of registering memory.
The format of bringing together two specific entities in an exhibition gives new sense to our ideas of the world, which functions like a plot for finding concealed or unapparent meanings and alternative structures of identification. It works with a set of coordinates that are interwoven, in which the speculative view of history mingles with the lived story, the conditional aesthetics converges with necessity, the possibilities of the present mixes with the imagination of the future, and the shift from hiding to disappearing leads to re-discovery.
South by Southeast. A Further Surface is extended from the original concept of South by Southeast held in Osage Art Foundation, Hong Kong in March 2015, by the invitation of Guangdong Times Museum. It is a gesture of the Times Museum to trace its location to Southeastern China and to take part in mediating imageries and geopolitical implications of the “Southeast” that were raised in the first part of the exhibition. Artists from Southeast Asia and Southeast Europe are brought together to create an experience that conveys the unique structure of the Southeast. The exhibition display creates the possibility for artists from both areas to relate to each other and to immerse the public in various states of mind.The Hong Kong articulation is further elaborated by bringing in new artists or by expanding the projects of those who had been part of the initial episode.
Participating artists: Art Labor (Vietnam), Pio Abad (The Philippines), Jon Cuyson (The Philippines), Maung Day (Myanmar), frombandungtoberlin.net (trans-national), Nilbar Güreş (Turkey), Ahdiyat Nur Hartata (Indonesia), Maja Hodošček (Slovenia), Ana Hušman (Croatia), Eisa Jocson (The Philippines), Šejla Kamerić (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Li Jinghu (China), Dalibor Martinis (Croatia), Sebastian Moldovan (Romania), Jakrawal Nilthamrong (Thailand), Aemilia Papaphilippou (Greece), Raluca Popa (Romania), Lia Perjovschi (Romania), Marko Tadić (Croatia), Saša Tkačenko (Serbia), Pradeep Thalawatta (Sri Lanka), The Bureau of Melodramatic Research (Romania), Lyno Vuth (Cambodia), Zhou Tao (China)
Related links: http://en.timesmuseum.org/exhibitions/detail/id-692/
Date:
September - 18 October 2016
Location:
Savvy Contemporary,
Berlin, Germany
Curated by Brigitta Isabella and Renan Laru-an
Participating artists: Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina, Annika Eriksson, Theo Eshetu, Lyra Garcellano & W. Don Flores, Ladislava Gažiová, Ho Rui An, Ho Tzu Nyen, Hiwa K, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, Eva Olthof, Karol Radziszewski / Queer Archives Institute, Cathleen Schuster and Marcel Dickhage, Sina Seifee, The Bureau of Melodramatic Research, Mi You, Virlani Rupini and Leon Tan
From Bandung to Berlin: If All of the Moons Aligned builds on the vocabularies of "political astronomy" by means of dis/connecting transnational narratives according to critical and geopolitical amplitudes during the Cold War. While revolving in the gravity of a multi¬center world, From Bandung to Berlin: If all of the moons aligned pins down incongruent points of these alignments, complicating desires for solidarity and cohesion through artistic forms, processes and contemporary thought practices.
At SAVVY Contemporary, the constraints of prevailing historiography and the impulses of democratism of the future are accessed through the curatorial period of From Bandung to Berlin (FBB). With collaborating agents, artworks, archives, lectures, reading groups, the bare gallery space accumulates sweats and breaths as bodies and objects struggle and recover from a place of weakness and fear. Each contribution presents as a ghostly figure and their task is to exorcise the unrepresentable narratives in history and engage with the ghostly through the spectral transformation of different objects, bodies and spatiality.
The enlistment of these knowledge¬-based aesthetic interventions is foreclosed in the course of From Bandung to Berlin: If all of the moons aligned in order to suspend timelines and alternatively procure waves of showing and discursification. From a place of toning, shaping, and even detoxification to the mesopolitics of protection and defences¬¬, From Bandung to Berlin: If all of the moons aligned lays over a political astronomy approximating the fictitious and factitious times and places of 1955 Bandung, 1989 Berlin, and our contemporary moment.
The exhibition is closely linked to a platform for knowledge accumulation:
September 23 | 7-10pm
Opening and performance by Ho Rui An
Solar: A Melt Down is a lecture that takes off from the sweaty back of a mannequin of the anthropologist Charles le Roux that the artist encountered in the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. From this image launches a series of investigations that attempts to get to the “behinds” of Empire and more crucially, the merciless sun behind it, beating down on the imperial back. Probing this “solar unconscious” underpinning the European colonial project, the lecture further considers the white woman and the punkawallah (manual fan operator) as figures constitutive of a “global domestic”—an all-encompassing, air-conditioned planetary interior. Spiralling into the contemporary moment of terrestrial meltdown, it finally seeks to reclaim sweat as a way of getting out of ourselves and in touch with the Solar.
September 24 | 2-6pm
UNCERTAIN GEOGRAPHIES. With a lecture-performance by Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina; and a talk with the curators
Cold War politics split the world into two large blocs and shed a new meaning to the term East and West, not only as a cartographic cardinal points but also a geopolitical symbol of place-making based on ideological alignment. “From Bandung to Berlin” is a loose framework that points out erratic transglobal-historical coordinates which were enabled by the political circuit of Cold War, the force of gravity amongst global ideological movement and the development of communication and space exploration technology. In this session, the spatio-temporal distance between Bandung 1955 and Berlin 1989 is revisited by tracing moments of alignment between the national and the international, the local and the translocal, the bilateral and the multilateral. The connections and disconnections of these encounters will supply an assemblage of meanings that gives new sense to the way we understand geography as a living border that are influenced by the mobility of bodies, capital, ideas and affect.
September 25 | 2-6pm
RESTITUTION AND VOCABULARIES. Discursive program with Ho Tzu Nyen, Sina Seifee, and others
The speculative approximations in From Bandung to Berlin gather processes of abstraction for a number of issues and parameters. While this procedure points us to alternative ways of showing and discursification, the project also recognizes how it has suspended timelines and procured foreclosures to constitute new vectors and references. Through artistic interventions, readings, and discussions, this open session leans on the question of restitution and its valences and limitations in projects of recomposing vocabularies.
Related links: http://savvy-contemporary.com/index.php/exhibitions/fbbde/
Related material: Exhibition leaflet PDF (downloable)
Date:
22 March - 8 May 2016
Location:
Guangdong Times Museum
Co-curated by Patrick D. Flores (The Philippines) and Anca Verona Mihuleţ (Romania)
Common is the notion that the south lies at the opposite of north and that the north is supposedly ascendant, more prone to power, and closer to the imagined center. The south is cast as the peripheral and the dispossessed and that it gathers at the perceived fringes of province on a map of asymmetries. Such a curious psychogeographical,or geopolitical, imagination yields another antinomy: the west and the east, bearing more or less equivalent valences as north and south. This procedure of organizing the world reduces the latter into polarities and verticalities, the west is modern and everywhere yet the east is timeless and afar. The situation where the south and the east cohere to form the coordinate of the southeast is exceptional. It is possibly a double negation: not north, not west. And as such, it is a productive locus: it is not the center, twice.
Commencing from a specific geography and a state of mind to generate a certain way of observing and understanding locality, the exhibition South by Southeast. A Further Surface discusses the spectral idea of artistic initiative through the lens of materiality and reciprocity as poignant and also resolute stances. The body of works presented in the exhibition centers on “Southeast” as a trope to understand the world today. The sociopolitical tensions in Southeast Asia and Southeast Europe have informed the art works produced in these regions, in the same way that certain prominent ideas nurtured in this artistic environment have raised questions that would shape social policies at a global level — like the interpretation of history, the mediation of archives, or the importance of registering memory.
The format of bringing together two specific entities in an exhibition gives new sense to our ideas of the world, which functions like a plot for finding concealed or unapparent meanings and alternative structures of identification. It works with a set of coordinates that are interwoven, in which the speculative view of history mingles with the lived story, the conditional aesthetics converges with necessity, the possibilities of the present mixes with the imagination of the future, and the shift from hiding to disappearing leads to re-discovery.
South by Southeast. A Further Surface is extended from the original concept of South by Southeast held in Osage Art Foundation, Hong Kong in March 2015, by the invitation of Guangdong Times Museum. It is a gesture of the Times Museum to trace its location to Southeastern China and to take part in mediating imageries and geopolitical implications of the “Southeast” that were raised in the first part of the exhibition. Artists from Southeast Asia and Southeast Europe are brought together to create an experience that conveys the unique structure of the Southeast. The exhibition display creates the possibility for artists from both areas to relate to each other and to immerse the public in various states of mind.The Hong Kong articulation is further elaborated by bringing in new artists or by expanding the projects of those who had been part of the initial episode.
Participating artists: Art Labor (Vietnam), Pio Abad (The Philippines), Jon Cuyson (The Philippines), Maung Day (Myanmar), frombandungtoberlin.net (trans-national), Nilbar Güreş (Turkey), Ahdiyat Nur Hartata (Indonesia), Maja Hodošček (Slovenia), Ana Hušman (Croatia), Eisa Jocson (The Philippines), Šejla Kamerić (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Li Jinghu (China), Dalibor Martinis (Croatia), Sebastian Moldovan (Romania), Jakrawal Nilthamrong (Thailand), Aemilia Papaphilippou (Greece), Raluca Popa (Romania), Lia Perjovschi (Romania), Marko Tadić (Croatia), Saša Tkačenko (Serbia), Pradeep Thalawatta (Sri Lanka), The Bureau of Melodramatic Research (Romania), Lyno Vuth (Cambodia), Zhou Tao (China)
Related links: http://en.timesmuseum.org/exhibitions/detail/id-692
Date:
September - 18 October 2016
Location:
Savvy Contemporary,
Berlin, Germany
Curated by Brigitta Isabella and Renan Laru-an
Participating artists: Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina, Annika Eriksson, Theo Eshetu, Lyra Garcellano & W. Don Flores, Ladislava Gažiová, Ho Rui An, Ho Tzu Nyen, Hiwa K, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, Eva Olthof, Karol Radziszewski / Queer Archives Institute, Cathleen Schuster and Marcel Dickhage, Sina Seifee, The Bureau of Melodramatic Research, Mi You, Virlani Rupini and Leon Tan
From Bandung to Berlin: If All of the Moons Aligned builds on the vocabularies of "political astronomy" by means of dis/connecting transnational narratives according to critical and geopolitical amplitudes during the Cold War. While revolving in the gravity of a multi¬center world, From Bandung to Berlin: If all of the moons aligned pins down incongruent points of these alignments, complicating desires for solidarity and cohesion through artistic forms, processes and contemporary thought practices.
At SAVVY Contemporary, the constraints of prevailing historiography and the impulses of democratism of the future are accessed through the curatorial period of From Bandung to Berlin (FBB). With collaborating agents, artworks, archives, lectures, reading groups, the bare gallery space accumulates sweats and breaths as bodies and objects struggle and recover from a place of weakness and fear. Each contribution presents as a ghostly figure and their task is to exorcise the unrepresentable narratives in history and engage with the ghostly through the spectral transformation of different objects, bodies and spatiality.
The enlistment of these knowledge¬-based aesthetic interventions is foreclosed in the course of From Bandung to Berlin: If all of the moons aligned in order to suspend timelines and alternatively procure waves of showing and discursification. From a place of toning, shaping, and even detoxification to the mesopolitics of protection and defences¬¬, From Bandung to Berlin: If all of the moons aligned lays over a political astronomy approximating the fictitious and factitious times and places of 1955 Bandung, 1989 Berlin, and our contemporary moment.
The exhibition is closely linked to a platform for knowledge accumulation:
September 23 | 7-10pm
Opening and performance by Ho Rui An
Solar: A Melt Down is a lecture that takes off from the sweaty back of a mannequin of the anthropologist Charles le Roux that the artist encountered in the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. From this image launches a series of investigations that attempts to get to the “behinds” of Empire and more crucially, the merciless sun behind it, beating down on the imperial back. Probing this “solar unconscious” underpinning the European colonial project, the lecture further considers the white woman and the punkawallah (manual fan operator) as figures constitutive of a “global domestic”—an all-encompassing, air-conditioned planetary interior. Spiralling into the contemporary moment of terrestrial meltdown, it finally seeks to reclaim sweat as a way of getting out of ourselves and in touch with the Solar.
September 24 | 2-6pm
UNCERTAIN GEOGRAPHIES. With a lecture-performance by Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina; and a talk with the curators
Cold War politics split the world into two large blocs and shed a new meaning to the term East and West, not only as a cartographic cardinal points but also a geopolitical symbol of place-making based on ideological alignment. “From Bandung to Berlin” is a loose framework that points out erratic transglobal-historical coordinates which were enabled by the political circuit of Cold War, the force of gravity amongst global ideological movement and the development of communication and space exploration technology. In this session, the spatio-temporal distance between Bandung 1955 and Berlin 1989 is revisited by tracing moments of alignment between the national and the international, the local and the translocal, the bilateral and the multilateral. The connections and disconnections of these encounters will supply an assemblage of meanings that gives new sense to the way we understand geography as a living border that are influenced by the mobility of bodies, capital, ideas and affect.
September 25 | 2-6pm
RESTITUTION AND VOCABULARIES. Discursive program with Ho Tzu Nyen, Sina Seifee, and others
The speculative approximations in From Bandung to Berlin gather processes of abstraction for a number of issues and parameters. While this procedure points us to alternative ways of showing and discursification, the project also recognizes how it has suspended timelines and procured foreclosures to constitute new vectors and references. Through artistic interventions, readings, and discussions, this open session leans on the question of restitution and its valences and limitations in projects of recomposing vocabularies.
Related links: http://savvy-contemporary.com/index.php/exhibitions/fbbde
Related material: Exhibition leaflet PDF (downloable)
