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Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #6

ART • SCIENCE • IMAGINATION • MEMORY

Janet Laurence in dialogue with Hu Xudong

26th OCTOBER 2014

At Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

Live-streamed with 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.

Australian artist Janet Laurence‘s work explores a poetics of space and materiality through the creation of works that deal with our experiential and cultural relationship with the natural world. Her work echoes architecture while retaining organic qualities and a sense of instability and transience. It occupies the liminal zones and meeting places of art, science, imagination and memory. Laurence’s practice includes both ephemeral and permanent works as well as installations that extend from the museum/gallery into both urban and landscape domain. Her work, centered on living nature, bleeds between the architectural and the natural world, physically and metaphorically dissolving these boundaries. Her spaces are immersive and reflective, creating a play between perception and memory. Alchemical transformation, history and perception are underlying themes. Laurence’s work is represented in major Australian and international collections and has been included in many national survey exhibitions.

Hu Xudong is a chinese poet, critic, essayist and translator. Born in Chongqing, lives now in Beijing. M.A. in Comparative Literature and Ph.D. in Chinese Contemporary Literature from Peking University, where he now is as an associate professor at the Institute of World Literature. He has published 7 books of poetry (From Water’s Edge, Juice of the Wind, Amor en los Tiempos del SARS, What Time Is It There？, The Strength of the Calendar, The Eternal Inside Man, Travel/Writing), 3 books of essays (Random Words of A Random Life, the Hidden Passion in Brazil, Random Thought after Random Eating), as well as a number of translations. In 2007 Hu Xudong was hailed as one of the ten present Top New Poets in China. He writes poetry and essays but also works as a columnist, translator and TV presentor. Xudong holds a doctorate in modern literature and lectures at Peking University. In his highly narrative poetic style he manages to put across elaborate stories couched in concise phrasing. Xudong is able to command a wide range of linguistic modes in his poems. He knows, for instance, how to incorporate provincial dialects but also how to include references to the Chinese literary classics or to the idiom of the world of advertising.

Janet Laurence in Dialogue with Isabel de Sena:

Janet Laurence screening and response by Hu Xudong: