Curating Contemporary Art (MA)
Yi-Ning Lin
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, 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, Panos Fourtoulakis, Charlotte dos Santos, 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.
Yi-Ning Lin (Michelle) is an individual with a passion for curating contemporary art and music. She has great enthusiasm and a special interest in curating moving visual arts and sounds. In her graduate project, she curated an online programme, in a collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary, titled Sets and Scenarios. Sets and Scenarios explored how moving images influence people, and how we live under this influence. This project invited reflection on the post-cinematic era and how people deal with visual power and beauty.
Michelle is committed to a career as an independent-minded contemporary art curator and an experimental sound creator. She demonstrates strengths in creativity, organisation, leadership, and self-motivation. As a forward-thinking curator and a critical writer, she aims to free people from the ordinary condition of being circumscribed by loops of knowledge production and image consumption.
Michelle’s dissertation analyses the shifting power between curators and artists as they exchange responsibilities and face competitive pressures in a variety of acoustic phenomena. To gain the inside perspectives of today’s artists and curators, Michelle worked in London Contemporary Music Festival 2019. She also joined the projects of Open Call for Young Artists 2019 and 2020. She is also a lifestyle contributor in the Taiwan-Britain Art-Design platform ＠Junctionissue and an art critic for the @ewaacenter East-West Art Agency.
