Back to Homepage
TIME_ART_IMPACT
An Education Collaboration With
25 May 2014 – June 2015
MONTHLY SCREENINGS & DIALOGUES
BETWEEN SHANGHAI AND MOMENTUM COLLECTION ARTISTS
MOMENTUM Berlin and Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai are proud to announce the collaborative project: Time_Art_Impact, a year-long education program of dialogues between media artists from the MOMENTUM Collection and key figures from the Shanghai art scene. Time_Art_Impact is the inaugural program of the new Media Library at Minsheng Art Museum, which will use the MOMENTUM Collection of international video art as a basis for a series of monthly cross-cultural dialogues via live-streaming technology. One evening each month for thirteen months, Minsheng Art Museum will host a live web-streamed artist talk and video screening with a total of thirteen selected artists from the MOMENTUM Collection. In the case of the MOMENTUM Collection artists being Berlin-based, MOMENTUM will concurrently host a live event in the Berlin Gallery. Each dialogue will be led by a different respondent from China, including art-historians, curators, editors, artists and directors. This collaboration aims to facilitate transcultural exchange through an ongoing conversation that collapses national borders and builds on a committed mutual engagement to explore and research time-based art. The thirteen dialogues will thereafter be archived and broadcast on the websites of both MOMENTUM and the Minsheng Art Museum, as well as on that of our media-partner, online art magazine Randian China. Through this structure of live and documented dialogues, both art professionals and public audiences can connect between Berlin, Shanghai and the global art community. Time_Art_Impact Dialogues take place monthly from 25 May 2014 – June 2015.
The Time_Art_Impact Dialogues will culminate in the exhibition TIK TOK: Time-Based Art | Beyond the Medium, taking place at Minsheng Art Museum in July – August 2015. TIK TOK, a collaboration between MOMENTUM, CHRONUS Art Center, and Minsheng Art Museum, features the MOMENTUM Collection and Performance Archive in dialogue with media art from China. Motivated by a commitment to supporting innovation in the arts worldwide, this exhibition places the MOMENTUM collection at the center of a transcultural dialogue on topics as diverse as the politics of representation, urban capitalism, the rhetoric of (post)colonialist aesthetics, gender- and body-politics, to name but a few.
The launch of Time_Art_Impact takes place on May 25th at 4:00pm at the Minsheng Museum, with Berlin-based Turkish performance and video-artist Nezaket Ekici in dialogue with Dr. Lu Xinghua, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Tongji University. The talk is accompanied by the screening of Ekici’s works from the MOMENTUM Collection and Performance Archive: Veiling and Reveiling (2010) and The Tube (2013).
Participating artists are:
Nezaket Ekici ◆ Thomas Eller ◆ Doug Fishbone ◆ Zuzanna Janin ◆ Hannu Karjalainen ◆ Janet Laurence ◆ Hye Rim Lee ◆ Map Office ◆ Kate McMillan ◆ David Medalla ◆ Fiona Pardington ◆ Mariana Vassileva
ABOUT MINSHENG ART MUSEUM
Minsheng Art Museum is a non-profit organization sponsored and funded by the China Minsheng Banking Corporation. Formally established in September, 2008, it has become mainland China’s first public welfare organization. It is located in Shanghai’s Redtown International Art Community and boasts a total surface of 4000m2, with five exhibition halls of about 1600m2 each.Though its focus lies primarily on Chinese modern and contemporary art, Minsheng Art Museum maintains a pronounced international perspective.
ABOUT THE MOMENTUM COLLECTION
|
READ THE MOMENTUM COLLECTION CATALOGUE
|
 |
The MOMENTUM Collection was established in 2010 through the generosity of a small group of artists. The donation of their works constituted their investment in MOMENTUM’s then-nascent model as a global and mobile platform for time-based art. Now including works by a total of twenty-six artists, the Collection represents a cross-section of exceptional time-based artworks by established as well as emerging artists from around the globe, including work from Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Finland, the US, the UK, Bulgaria, Turkey, Poland and Germany. Still growing, the collection reflects the growth of MOMENTUM itself. While it develops and nurtures its relationship with its artists, MOMENTUM continually endeavors to bring their work to new audiences worldwide. The steady growth of the Collection through donations by artists is a direct reflection of the relationships and networks established through the strength of MOMENTUM’s exhibition programs.
MOMENTUM is a non-profit global platform for time-based art, with headquarters in Berlin at the Bethanien Art Center. Through MOMENTUM’s program of Exhibitions, Education, Public Video Art Initiatives, Residencies, and Collection, they are dedicated to providing a platform for exceptional international artists working with time-based practices. The term ‘time-based’ art means very different things today than when it was first coined over forty years ago. MOMENTUM’s mission is to continuously reassess the growing diversity and relevance of time-based practices, always seeking innovative answers to the question, ‘what is time-based art’? Positioned as a global platform with a vast international network, MOMENTUM serves as a bridge joining professional art communities, irrespective of institutional and national borders. The key ideas driving MOMENTUM are: Collaboration, Exchange, Education, Innovation, and Inspiration.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Nezaket Ekici (Kirşehir, 1970) is a Turkish-born performance and video artist based in Germany, who holds a Master’s degree in Performance Art from the Marina Abramovic Institute. Through performances marked by a strong and crisp visual language, Ekici confronts culturally specific attributes of femininity, contesting their agency on the body. Diligently undergoing and/or withstanding the habits dictated by these objects, she questions the opposition between confinement and concealment, public and private, safety and repression. Through a practice largely grounded in durational performance and most distinctively in psycho-physical endurance and tenacity, Ekici’s work interconnects everyday elements to form a total work of art — a Gesamtkunstwerk.
Thomas Eller (b. 1964) is a German visual artist, curator, and writer based in Berlin. In 2004 he founded the online magazine Artnet China, and in 2008 was the artistic director of the Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin. Thomas Eller is the curator of Die 8 der Wege, the exhibition of contemporary art from Beijing which took place in on Berlin 29 April – 13 July 2014.
Doug Fishbone (New York, 1969) is an American artist based in London. He was awarded the Beck’s Futures Prize for Student Film and Video in 2004 and has been heralded as one of the art world’s ‘Future Greats’ by Art Review. His practice is characterized by a critical and often humorous examination of consumer culture, mass media and the politics of representation. Synching found imagery from the Google Image search-engine to his tantalizing monologues, Fishbone plays on the pervasive gullibility and misplaced good faith of the media-consuming masses.
Zuzanna Janin (Warsaw, 1961) is a visual artist and former teen actor from Poland, currently based in Warsaw. Her practice encompasses a variety of media, including sculpture, video, installation, photography and performance. Janin works in a quasi-autobiographical, non-narrative mode in which she creates intricately montaged videos juxtaposing personal footage and fragments from the history of cult cinema. The stratified imagery of her high-paced films is acutely demanding of the viewer and manifests the complex nature of identity-formation as a both contrived and contriving process.
Hannu Karjalainen (Haapavesi, 1978) is a Finnish-born, artist based in Helsinki, who graduated from the Department of Photography at the University of Industrial Arts Helsinki and The Helsinki School in 2005. Through video and sound installations, Karjalainen reflects on the contiguous nature of still imagery in photography and painting. Predominantly focused on the age-old genre of portraiture and the highly coded though elusive meaning of colours, his increasingly conceptual practice is marked by slight differences and repetitions, obliging the viewer to look with the utmost deliberation and develop an eye for details and traces of facture.
Janet Laurence (Sydney, 1947) is an Australian mixed-media and installation artist based in Sydney. Often creating site-specific work in collaboration with landscape architects and environmental scientists, the material textures of her subjects – always derived from nature – reflect the artist’s focus on the point of intersection between science and art. After working primarily in photography and installation, Laurence began an ongoing filmic study of animals both in the wild and in nature reserves. She has developed a filming technique in which she uses infrared night cameras – similar to those used by naturalists, as many animals are primarily active at night – in order to achieve a negative effect and distorted, ghostly coloration. Laurence is one of Australia’s most senior woman artists, with works in every major museum across the country.
Hye Rim Lee (Seoul, 1963) is a Korean artist based in New York and Auckland. Working predominantly with 3D animation and adopting the newest digital technologies of visualization, Hye Rim Lee’s animations invoke the slick and polished aesthetics of cyber-culture. Featuring heavily computerized cosmetic imagery such as perfume-flacons containing designer body-parts bobbing around in a swarm of gel-pearls, Hye Rim Lee’s animations invoke our tendency to love and emulate our digital avatars, though consistently abstaining from adopting a nostalgic or judgmental posture.
Map Office is a multidisciplinary platform initiated by Laurent Gutierrez (Casablanca, 1966) and Valérie Portefaix (Saint-Etienne, 1969), currently based in Hong Kong. Gutierrez is associate professor at the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University as well as co-leader of Urban Environments Design Lab. He is currently doing a PhD on the ‘Processes of Modernization and Urbanization in China focusing on the Pearl River Delta Region’. Portefaix is a visiting assistant professor at the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Their “project forms a critique of spatio-temporal anomalies and documents how human beings subvert and appropriate space”. Grounded in a rigorous understanding of literary history and post-structuralist theory, Map Office seeks to undermine the controlling mechanisms of capitalism by structurally sabotaging its urban structures.
Kate McMillan (Hampshire, 1974) is an interdisciplinary Australian artist based in London and holding an Academic Post with Open University, Australia. She is a PhD candidate at Curtin University, wherein she examines the forgotten histories of Wadjemup/Rottnest Island. Having undertaken numerous residencies in Tokyo, Switzerland, Berlin, Sydney, China and Hong Kong, McMillan incorporates sculpture, photography, film, sound and painting to explore the complex relationship between memory and place. With phantasmal figures appearing and disappearing in haunting landscapes, her works act as mnemonic devices, conveying site-specific traces of forgotten histories.
David Medalla (Manila, 1942) is an interdisciplinary Filipino artist based in London, New York and Paris. Having begun his studies of drama and literature at Columbia University at the age of twelve, he went on to establish a prolific career, including the chairing, founding and directing of various art initiatives, including the London Biennale, an entirely artist-run initiative of meetings and events. Medalla has lectured widely in universities around the globe and has received numerous prizes, including those from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Jerome Foundation of America. Ranging from sculpture, kinetic art, painting, installation and performance, Medalla’s pseudo-surrealist, conceptual work is a poetic consideration on how the relationship between man, nature and machine becomes manifest through migratory motifs.
Fiona Pardington (Devonport, 1961) is a photographer of Ngai Tahu, Kati Mamoe (Maori) and Scottish descent, based in Waiheke Island, New Zealand and holds a PhD from The University of Auckland. Her work is concerned with the history of photography, most notably in its genealogy within still-life painting and its application as a tool to create (colonialist) scientific imagery, which itself has strong stylistic ties to the still-life genre. Her photographs demonstrate a mastery of analogue darkroom technique, and she is known for her deeply toned black-and-white images resulting from specialist hand printing. She has received many fellowships, residencies, awards and grants, including the Ngai Tahu residency at Otago Polytechnic in 2006, Frances Hodgkins Fellow in both 1996 & 97, Visa Gold Art Award 1997, and the Moet & Chandon Fellow (France) in 1991-92.
Mariana Vassileva (Dobric, 1964) is a Bulgarian artist whose practice spans a variety of media, including video, sculpture, installation and drawing. Vassileva graduated from the Universität der Künste in 2000 and continues to live and work in Berlin. Based upon her observation of daily life and with the curious gaze of a voyeur or an urban anthropologist, she inspects people and their surroundings in order to capture the poetry that lies beneath the quotidian and the routine. Watching, and the distance it implies, are both method and subject of a body of work reflecting on human concerns familiar to us all: communication, cultural displacement, relations with self and other, loneliness and the humor hidden within the rhythms of the day-to-day.
ABOUT THE CURATORS
Tracy Yu is senior assistant director of Minsheng Art Museum and in charge of art projects, business operations and media promotion. Born in 1983, she currently lives and works in Shanghai. She graduated at the College of Fine Arts, Shanghai University with a Master’s degree in Art History in 2008. In her work, she devotes herself with passion to arts and professional knowledge. She founded many public education projects, which have had great impact for the public, such as: Poetry Comes to the Museum, Minsheng Theatre and Kids Museum.
Dr. Rachel Rits-Volloch is a contemporary art curator specialized in time-based art, and is the founding-director of MOMENTUM. She is currently based in Berlin, having previously lived and worked in the US, the UK, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Istanbul, and Sydney. She graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Literature and holds an M.Phil. and PhD from the University of Cambridge in Film Studies. She wrote her dissertation on visceral spectatorship in contemporary cinema, focusing on the biological basis of embodiment. Having lectured in film studies and visual culture, her focus shifted to contemporary art after she undertook a residency at A.R.T Tokyo. After founding MOMENTUM in Sydney in 2010, it rapidly evolved into a global platform for time-based art, with headquarters in Berlin. Through MOMENTUM’s extensive program of exhibitions, education programs, video-art in public space initiatives, residencies and a growing collection of time-based art, she is dedicated to providing a platform for exceptional artists working with time-based practices.
