Translife - Media Art China 2011
After the overwhelming success in 2008 of the media art exhibition Synthetic Times – 95,000 visitors in three weeks! – the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) decided to make it a recurring triennial event. The Chinese like to take the bull by the horns. So now, in 2011, NAMOC is back with another impressive show.
Weather Tunnel, entrance of NAMOC 2011
In 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics, V2_ was a NAMOC partner and one of the exhibition's chief providers of art. The show's success led to a far-reaching collaboration between the labs at V2_ in Rotterdam, Tsinghua University in Beijing and Parsons The New School for Design in New York – the Tsinghua Art & Science Media Laboratory (TASML). The three labs set up this joint exchange program to enable students and artists from the three countries to make use of each other’s facilities and areas of expertise. Rotterdam artist Marnix de Nijs's installation 15 Minutes of Biometric Fame, which will be on view in the NAMOC exhibition, was co-produced by V2_ and partly developed during the first TASML artist-in-residency in China. The Chinese artist Xiaowen Zhu is currently participating in a summer residency at V2_.
Translife
The subject matter of the NAMOC exhibition is timely and reflects global developments in media art in a contemporary context:
Amidst the global challenges of climate and ecological crises that threaten the very existence of humanity, the exhibition TransLife reflects on the whereabouts of humankind in relationship to nature through a unique perspective and philosophical speculation, calling for citizen participation in facing these imminent challenges with artistic imagination to advocate a new world view of nature and a retooled humanist proposition.
From: http://mediartchina.org
NAMOC managed once again to design an impressive entrance for the show. The big temporary architectural piece called The Weather Tunnel contains 13 works relating to the theme of ecology. Visitors can discover such works as Britain's Kasia Molga’s installation Oil Compass, produced in connection with Cesar Harada’s Protei project, co-produced by V2_ this summer. Edwin van der Heide's Evolving Spark Network, on view at V2_ earlier this year, has also been shipped to China and will be on display in the main exhibition. Bernie Lubell, who had a major exhibition in 2009, is presented with Aphasiogram. The 300-page catalogue features writing by thinkers including Bruno Latour, Peter Sloterdijk, Eugene Thacker, Zhang Ga, Chris Salter and essayist Arjen Mulder.
