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1 January – 29 February 2016
Bio
Ma Li (b. Fuzhou, China) is an interdisciplinary artist working with painting, sculpture, installation and performance. Using both traditional and nontraditional media, Ma Li formulates dreamlike worlds influenced in part by her background in choreography and upbringing in a collectivist society. Originally from Fuzhou, China, She has a BS degree in Chemical Engineering from Shanghai Dong Hua University, and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (2014). She has been awarded grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Knight Foundation; a fellowship from La Napoule Art Foundation; and the Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Award. She has been a resident artist at Recology San Francisco, Vermont Studio Center, Elsewhere Museum, among others. Ma Li has exhibited her work in a range of museums and galleries, including solo shows such as Gathering Among Stars, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2015); and Seeing, Peeping, and Scrying, Alter Space, Peephole Gallery, San Francisco (2015). Group shows include Zhong Gallery (Berlin), A.I.R Gallery (Brooklyn), Gallery 825 (Los Angeles), SOMArts (San Francisco), and Root Division (San Francisco), amongst others. Of note is inclusion of her work in the Nion Mcevoy Art Collection and reviews of her work in China Daily, VOA, KQED, and other leading publications.
Project Description
During her residency at MOMENTUM Ma Li will explore the possibilities of combining time-based materials in her projects. Having previous worked primarily with interactive performance and installation, her research at MOMENTUM will focus on how time-based materials can support and provide an additional level of experience for participatory projects. In experimenting with ways of using the element of video in her practice, Ma Li is planning to film footage with selected participants at various historical and monumental locations in Berlin. From the resulting footage, she will produce a video based on the choreography of connection between the participants in the video performance. In addition, Ma Li will execute a live performance, which will include the screening of her video work. The entire performance / installation will be documented. Ma Li is especially interested in exploring if and how the incorporation of video into live performance can add to the participatory experience of the spectators.
Ma Li, “The Ascent of Azure Dragon”, Video Still (2014)
Prinivethao: Space Salutation
Sasha Pirogova & Ma Li
Performance on the Opening night of the Exhibition
Sasha Pirogova: A Retrospective
More Info HERE >>
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MOMENTUM Artists-in-Residence Sasha Pirogova and Ma Li draw on their upbringing in the collectivist societies of Russia and China in their interactive performance work. Coming to contemporary art through a background in physics and chemical engineering, respectively, and having both trained in contemporary dance, the choreography of bodies moving through space is integral to their ways of working. Brought together for the first time through MOMENTUM AiR, Sasha Pirogova and Ma Li are here also making their first cooperative project.
Thinking about the macro scale of space and its projection to the micro level of human beings, Ma Li and Sasha Pirogova team up for a “play game” and invite the audience to take part in a ceremony which enacts a supernova explosion triggered by the merging of two white dwarfs. Please join us in imagining a new geographical landscape without borders and separations on the occasion of the opening of the CTM Festival 2016 “New Geographies”.
EXHIBITION OPENING
(photos by Tiare Maldonado Hucke)
