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Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #10
The Contemporary Jester
Humor, satire and role-play in Doug Fishbone’s politics of mass-media representation
Doug Fishbone in dialogue with Shen Qilan
22th MARCH 2015
At Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai
MOMENTUM Berlin and Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai are proud to present 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-stream between Berlin, Shanghai and the rest of the world.
Doug Fishbone, an American artist based in London, often uses satire and humor in his films, performances and installations to critically examine consumer culture, mass media, relative perception and context. His work frequently forces the viewer to confront his-or-her own interpretive backgrounds. By combining a variety of found images from Google Image Search, Fishbone illustrates and undermines his own confrontational, repulsive and funny monologues on contemporary media and its corollary, the underground and avant-garde. Fishbone is best known for his project 30,000 Bananas, a mountain of ripe bananas installed in the middle of London’s Trafalgar Square and later given away to the audience for free. In 2004, his work was included in the British Art Show 6, a national touring exhibition held every five years in celebrate of the best of contemporary British art. Fishbone had his first major solo project at Gimpel Fils in London in 2006, and he performed at the Hayward Gallery in 2007. He has since performed live at the ICA, exhibited at Rokeby, London, Tate Britain, the 2008 Busan Biennale and in Switzerland, Japan and Korea. He was heralded as one of the art world’s “Future Greats” by Art Review magazine. Most recently, Fishbone has recently produced a feature-length action film, Elmina, that connects two vastly different audiences of the Western art world and the African home video market. Filmed in Ghana with major Ghanaian celebrities, the movie’s only artistic intervention is the insertion of Fishbone, a white American artist, as the lead role in a completely African production. The work fully adopts Ghanaian film making conventions, taking advantage of the shared language used and the low cost structure of the Ghanaian home video industry. In this new project Fishbone continues to examine the complex relationship between perception and reality and the politics of representation while simultaneously asking wider questions about race, globalization and notions of a shared visual language. (Rokeby Gallery, London). Born in New York in 1969, Fishbone earned an MA in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths College in 2003 and was awarded the Beck’s Futures Prize for Student Film and Video in 2004.
Dr. Shen QilanD is an expert on arts and culture and a member of the editorial board of BOOKTOWN Magazine. She holds a master of philosophy from Fudan University and obtained her Ph.D. at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany. Prior, she was Director of the editorial department of Art World magazine (2010-2011), and later Chief Editor of Arts and Director of International Projects at Shanghai Insight Media (China South Publishing & Media Group). Qilan is dedicated to cultural projects between Europe and China and became chief advisor, editor, and co-author of Europe-China Cultural Compass — Orientation for Cultural Cooperation between China and Europe. She organizes events and gives lectures at different cultural institutions. Qilan was invited as “Kulturvermittler”, a scholarship awarded by the Goethe-Institute to visit Berlin, and was invited as a speaker to the 5th World Summit on Arts and Culture in Melbourne, Australia.
WATCH THE TALK: