How Close Is Here
In March 2019 I was invited by Almost Four Art Space, a tiny independent art space in Chengdu, China to spend a 1-month residency and develop an exhibition programme for the space. In cooperation with Christopher Sand-Iversen, a Copenhagen-based artist and curator and Almost Four co-founder Jody Huang we implemented strategies of essayistic storytelling to undertake an intercultural research between Germany, China and Denmark, resulting in a collaborative exhibition-installation of several artists from the three countries.
Based on photographs taken in Chengdu and additional ones from the archive, a multiperspectival narrative evolved over the four-weeks-period on the walls of Almost Four. My photographs and texts by Christopher Sand-Iversen - recating to the photographs in an associative way - formed an initial fragmentary relation, shown at a first opening.
Two Chengdu-based artists, Ma Kun and Wang Yi Shan then adopted the inchoate tale, pursuing and re-contextualising it by adding their own threads. Ma Kun's ink drawings, referring to 'traditional' Chinese maps (you can have a long and serious discussion about the use of the word 'traditional' in this context with him) relocate the photographs to an imaginary landscape, while Yi Shan's short film takes us on a road trip to the industrial town he grew up at. The soundtrack of the film, the taped conversation of a couple in their car driving back to that town begins to overlap with the thoughts of the Christopher Sand-Iversen's fictitious author. The final stage of the installation, shown at a second opening at the end of the residency, can be seen as the work of this fictitious character unifying the minds of four artists from three countries. Or as the collective work it is.
The project was kindly supported by IFA, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Germany.
How Close Is Here?
In March 2019 I was invited by Almost Four Art Space, a tiny independent art space in Chengdu, China to spend a 1-month residency and develop an exhibition programme for the space. In cooperation with Christopher Sand-Iversen, a Copenhagen-based artist and curator and Almost Four co-founder Jody Huang we implemented strategies of essayistic storytelling to undertake an intercultural research between Germany, China and Denmark, resulting in a collaborative exhibition-installation of several artists from the three countries.
Based on photographs taken in Chengdu and additional ones from the archive, a multiperspectival narrative evolved over the four-weeks-period on the walls of Almost Four. My photographs and texts by Christopher Sand-Iversen - recating to the photographs in an associative way - formed an initial fragmentary relation, shown at a first opening.
Two Chengdu-based artists, Ma Kun and Wang Yi Shan then adopted the inchoate tale, pursuing and re-contextualising it by adding their own threads. Ma Kun's ink drawings, referring to 'traditional' Chinese maps (you can have a long and serious discussion about the use of the word 'traditional' in this context with him) relocate the photographs to an imaginary landscape, while Yi Shan's short film takes us on a road trip to the industrial town he grew up at. The soundtrack of the film, the taped conversation of a couple in their car driving back to that town begins to overlap with the thoughts of the Christopher Sand-Iversen's fictitious author. The final stage of the installation, shown at a second opening at the end of the residency, can be seen as the work of this fictitious character unifying the minds of four artists from three countries. Or as the collective work it is.
The project was kindly supported by IFA, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Germany.