“Ractured Lives / Fragile Existences” Exhibition
NOoSPHERE
This event has ended.
CURATORIAL TEAM:
The esteemed Chinese curator Feng Boyi has worked with presentations of Chinese contemporary art at home and abroad for many years. He divides his time between being Chief Curator at He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen outside Hong Kong and the Jinji Lake Art Museum in Zuchow outside Shanghai and curating exhibitions all over China and abroad. He has worked with the famous artist and dissident Ai Weiwei for decades, and together they published the White, Gray and Black books (1993-1995) of artists who were not accepted by the Chinese authorities. Feng Boyi curated Ai Weiwei´s groundbreaking exhibition Fuck Off in 2000, as well as the recent follow-up, Fuck Off II, in Groningen, Holland. He has also curated several exhibits together with Ai Weiwei, his longtime friend. Boyi’s projects Real Life Stories and Skin, Flesh & Bone, showcasing 14 of China´s most prominent artists and including a world premiere of a new installation by Ai Weiwei, won the Norwegian Art Critics’ Award for 2012.
Wang Dong is a young emerging curator who works at the He Xinagjing Art Museum in Shenzhen in China. He was among a small select group of curators who were invited by Carolyn Christov Bakargiev for a special curatorial program at Documenta 13. He was also co-curator of the award-winning exhibitions Real Life Stories and Skin, Flesh & Bone in Bergen, Norway, in 2012.
Norwegian Bjørn Inge Follevaag is the third member of the curatorial team behind the two above-mentioned shows held in Bergen last year. He has worked as a gallery director and as a independent curator for almost twenty years. His major projects include Placing Time & Evil, a mid-career retrospective of Andres Serrano (2000-2002), Goya´s Caprichios, Heri Dono (Indonesia), and a large contingency of Chinese contemporary artists from as early as 1991. Follevaag also serves as NOoSPHERE Arts’ international representative.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Æsa Björk (Iceland/Norway) is a renowned glass artist who currently teaches at Alfred University upstate New York. Besides working with glass, she also does performance and photography. This installation consisting of glass sculpture and photography now on view at NOoSPHERE Arts has been nominated for one of the world’s most prestigious glass art awards, the Coburg Prize .This same work will also be featured in a major exhibition at the Pera Museum in Istanbul in late January.
Øyvind Johnsen (Norway) has worked with video and photography for many years and is one of the first artists in our country to adopt the medium of with video-based art. This is his first visit to New York.
Gaby Steiner (Switzerland), a video artist and photographer, has produced an eloquent interview with the Jewish artist Efroim Snyder. Currently doing an artist residency in Berlin, Gaby is based in New York City.
Liang Dantu graduated from the Shanghai Art Academy only one year ago. While she has already been represented in several museum shows, this exhibition at NOoSPHERE Arts is only her second gallery exhibit.
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So much in our lives depends on belonging. On being included and being seen. Being seen; as in being accepted and approved of by our peers, societies and cultures. Yet, this approval and sense of belonging are fragile elements – so easily disturbed or eviscerated by sudden and unforeseen outside factors like prejudice, intolerance or ignorance. This exhibition deals with some of these issues on a personal as well as a political level.
In our curatorial practices, we have always been fascinated by the storytellers. By building exhibitions in which the viewer may come out with a sense of having experienced something significant. Whether this ambition has been reached in the current exhibition remains to be seen. We have tried to avoid “artspeak”, the artificial language of the art world, because it doesn’t speak, it alienates. The message in this exhibition is no high-brow statement to promote the curators’ intellectual superiority, but rather a quiet comment on the condition of things, and an appeal to listen and see.
PASS OVER by the Norwegian artist Øyvind Johnsen is a 30-minute video based on the true story of a Jewish/German couple from the 1880’s. Nelly Hamburger and her German boyfriend Hans Grüner were not permitted by their respective parents to marry, so they eloped. They fled to Norway and spent one long fall together at Stalheim Hotel in Voss. This is also where they committed joint suicide. Nelly survived, but nobody knows what happened to her later in life. In this work, Johnsen talks about pain – about existential suffering, and of what could have been if prejudice and conformity had not stood in the way.
In her series of works titled Transitions, the Icelandic/Norwegian artist Æsa Björk discusses the boundaries of the body and the borders of trust. Æsa Björk talks about that which is, by way of a fragile, naked body in a glass coffin weighed down by hundreds of heavy glass marbles; a poetic comment on the traces life leaves on our bodies and the boundaries we use to protect it.
In her biographical video The Arthodox: the Freedom of Choosing Restriction about the New York artist Efroim Snyder, Swiss-born Gaby Steiner describes the conscious choice of an artist within the contemporary field to embrace traditional faith and its paraphernalia, and the dilemmas involved in this transition from a so-called modern lifestyle to committing to what many perceive as an old-fashioned and archaic way of life.
Chinese-born artist Liang Dantu talks about recreation and reincarnation in her surreal, but strongly compelling paintings. While they may appear as simple narratives at first glance, the works are laden with symbolism. Elements of fauna and flora are conscious observations of life’s fragility and a statement to the artist’s desire to protect and preserve all living things.
Media
Schedule
from January 10, 2014 to February 02, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-01-10 from 18:00 to 20:00