Curating Contemporary Art (MA)
Sha Li
In recent years, the development of media has transformed the way we experience moving images. Sets and Scenarios explores our heightened proximity to images and what it means to live under their influence. The online programme is composed of moving image works, text and performance that unfolds in three acts.
Commissions by Eva Gold and Adam Christensen delve into notions of control, perversity, desire and heartache. Through text and repurposed film footage, Eva Gold devises scenes of obsessive voyeurism, unravelling how film permeates our dreams and the depth of our psyche. Adam Christensen invites the audience to a performance for the camera in his house-cum-baroque-theatrical-stage, obscuring distinctions between on- and off-set.
In times of reduced mobility, commissions by Aaron Ratajczyk and Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi find motion between images. Aaron Ratajczyk stages a one-to-one rehearsal via video call – the screen as proxy to corporeal normalcy – while movements in time and history are proposed by Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi’s multi- layered films. Presented through a fictitious map, the works expand into a rhizomatic network of different media.
For its inaugural week, Sets and Scenarios presented screenings of moving image works that expand our exploration of the relationship between viewer and screen as images penetrate retina and ear, before creeping beneath the skin, toward the flesh, muscles and viscera. The screening programme featured works and contributions by James Richards and Steve Reinke, Bette Gordon, Cerith Wyn Evans, Deborah Stratman, Shahryar Nashat, Mary Helena Clark, Sidsel Meineche Hansen and others.
Sets and Scenarios is curated by Jade Barget, Angela Blanc, Charlotte dos Santos, Panos Fourtoulakis, Sha Li, Yi-Ning Lin and Lindsey Wiercioch as part of the MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects 2020, Royal College of Art, London, in partnership with Nottingham Contemporary.
Sha Li is an independent curator and filmmaker based in London, UK. She has worked at various institutions, exhibitions, and a series of curatorial projects in Beijing, Shanghai, London, Paris, Copenhagen, and Vancouver.
Her practice focuses on transcultural identities, social, political, and cultural changes within digital culture. For her, curating is the fruit of the labor of a network of agents that foster alternative dialogues and future projections between artists, designers, architects, theorists, editors, marketers, communicators, and audiences from diverse backgrounds. Her curatorial approach embraces open-endedness, dialogue, collaboration, multi-disciplinary, multi-sensory, and process-based work, creating spaces and modes of display that reflect an emphasis on curatorial, educational, and experiential programme.
Sha also adopts a proactive, creative, and political thinking in her production, mediation, and dissemination of art, as it interrogates itself in the contemporary moment. The exhibition space comes to function as the main context of, and the primary medium for the realization of the artwork and -at the same time - as a site in which the work of art can be activated by and modified in response to each specific exhibition context.
Her recent curatorial projects each address an urgent query, to operate as an active catalyst in society: POST FROM THE 1st LOCKDOWN (2020 Upcoming) sources work by artists in isolation in Wuhan, China; the online public programme Sets and Scenarios (2020) in partnership with Nottingham Contemporary explores our heightened proximity to images and what it means to live under their influence. Queering Now (2020), a queer film and performance night at CAN Festival, London supported by the British Arts Council and Live Art UK amplifies marginalized voices of Chinese Queer, including artists such as Vctoria Sin, Whiskey Chow, Wang Haiyang, and Ayesha Tan-Jones. The group exhibition Glocal Living Room (2019) featured as the BEYOND EXTENDS section at Art021, Shanghai interrogates the current transcultural transformation in China, to raise questions on big data, surveillance, censorship, Chinafrica, and identity politics.
Image: Sha Li portrayed in the artwork "Akram Zaatary + Angus Fairhust, 2015" by Tan Tian. Exhibited at Glocal Living Room. Courtesy the artist and White Space Beijing.
Eva Gold, For your Discreet Viewing Pleasure, 2020 Film-still
Repurposed film footage from:
Hidden (Caché), (Michael Haneke, 2005)
Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997)
In Collaboration with:
Aaron Ratajczyk, A Hole in Space ATH-BER 03, 2020 film-still
Juan Pablo Cámara is an Argentinian choreographer and performer who graduated from the School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam, in 2017. His work has been presented in a variety of cities, including Buenos Aires, Amsterdam, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid and Lisbon. Juan Pablo has performed with choreographers such as Jefta van Dinther, Michele Rizzo, Adam Linder and Kat Valastur.
In Collaboration with:
Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, The In/Extinguishable Fire, 2019, still, courtesy of the artist.
Films:
Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Syncrisis, movement II, 2019
Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Linger On Your Pale Blue Eyes, 2016
Letters:
Anonymous
Pujan Karambeigi
Minh Nguyen
Simon Starling
Vu Tran
Artist
Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi is a Berlin- and London-based artist whose practice mutates in and out of sculpture, installation, moving image and interdisciplinary research. Her work explores imaginations of freedom at the intersection of film-making and film theory, critical refugee studies and postcolonial studies, personal/prosthetic memory and individual/collective histories. In September 2020, Thuy-Han will begin pursuing PhD research in film at the University of Westminster. She has previously exhibited and screened her work at Atletika, Vilnius; Centro di Musica Contemporanea di Milano, Milan; Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago; Kunstverein Nürnberg, Nürnberg; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Portikus, Frankfurt; Sàn Art, Saigon; University of Bonn, Bonn, among other venues.
Writers
Pujan Karambeigi is editorial contributor at Jacobin, co-founder of the criticism newspaper Downtown Critic and a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, New York, where he focuses on cultures of labour and economies of identity. His writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Frieze, Mousse, among other platforms. Most recently, he edited Alice Creischer, In the Stomach of the Predators: Writings and Collaborations (saxpublishers, 2019).
Minh Nguyen is a writer and curator of exhibitions and programmes currently living in Chicago, IL, by way of Saigon, Vietnam. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a Master’s degree in Modern and Contemporary Art History. She has organised exhibitions at Chicago Cultural Center (forthcoming), Wing Luke Museum, King Street Station, and SOIL Gallery, and is currently Curatorial Assistant at Conversations at the Edge (CATE), which is a series of screenings, talks, and performances by new media artists. Minh Nguyen’s writing has appeared in ArtAsiaPacific, Art in America, Art Practical, and AQNB, among others.
Simon Starling lives and works in Copenhagen. Since emerging from the Glasgow art scene in the early 1990s, Starling has established himself as one of the leading artists of his generation, working in a wide variety of media (film, installation, photography) to interrogate the histories of art and design, scientific discoveries and global economic and ecological issues, among other subjects. He represented Scotland at the 50th Biennale di Venezia (2003), and won the Turner Prize 2005 for his work Shedboatshed. Simon Starling’s work has been presented at the Villa Arson, Nice; the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Mass MOCA, North Adams; Tate Britain, London; Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; and MUMA in Melbourne.
Vu Tran was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and raised in the United States. He is a fiction writer, a criticism columnist for the Virginia Quarterly Review, and a professor at the University of Chicago, where he directs the undergraduate programme in creative writing. Vu Tran’s first novel, Dragonfish, was labeled a ‘notable book’ in the New York Times and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.
