Ghost Dance
Jimei X Arles Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image, Jury Panel’s Special MentionJimei Art Centre
11/29/2024 – 01/12/2025
In the film Ghost Dance, Jacques Derrida, improvising the role of a professor, when asked whether he believes in ghosts, answers: The cinema is the art of ghosts…It’s the art of allowing the ghosts to come back.1 Imagery retains and summons haunting memories of the past, while memories, by projecting onto images, acquire “grafts” of spectrality.2 The dialectical image, in its interaction with humans, is a suspended sway between life and death, alienation and new meaning, becoming a spectral Nachleben amidst historical alternation.
The exhibition “Ghost Dance” employs image archive as a ghost medium and memory technology. Featuring photography, video installations, and archival works, it aims to reveal the spatial and temporal disjunction within geopolitical diaspora and personal archives, attempting counter-chronicle activation, reconfiguration, and continuous overwriting of the image Nachleben.
Despite the global nomadism envisioned by digital media, the perpetual homelessness of transnational diasporic identities still lingers and causes a mal-être. Those who depart undergo a dual erasure, both physical and narrative, by their homeland, becoming “irrelevant others” excluded from a solidified national identity, as though severed yet enduring. The nostalgic specters, whether unable or unwilling to be eradicated, transform into a desire for archive amid fragmented temporal and geographical experiences. In the exhibition, private image archives and visual reconstruction of historical documents spotlight how the hyper-rationality of archival technology can be undermined and disrupted by subjective emotions, the heterogeneous ruptures hidden in the spectral experience, and even writing fallacies of diaspora. Meanwhile, this archive fever (mal d’archive), driven by compulsion of self-sustenance and self-preservation, is often inscribed by a self-destructive death drive,3 where writing and erasure of memories parallel. Through the “archiviolithic” tendency of archive, the exhibition not only addresses image archive as an existence of personal and collective memory but also explores how it dances as a ghost, between presence and absence, to extend the retelling of migration and archive its own narratives through enduring ephemerality.
1 Ghost Dance, directed by Ken McMullen (1983), 16:00-17:00.
2 Antoine De Baecque, Thierry Jousse, “Cinema and its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, Discourse 37, no. 1-2 (2015): 26-27.
3 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 11-12.
Curator: Starry Chen, Sylvia Tan
Artists: Laura Chen, Carô Gervay, Ance Janevica, Lee Kai Chung, Hester Yang, Tianyi Zheng
Features/Press
Three Shadows Photography Art Centre ->
The Art Journal ->
Artisle ->
Cover images courtesy of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre
Unanswered Call
Duo Exhibition by Zheng Kaijia & Zhou Chi
CHOWspace, No.2, Lane 41, Yuqing Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai08/24/2024 – 09/30/2024
Based on a longstanding understanding of the instability of subjectivity, “Unanswered Call” explores how the body, as the materiality of subjectivity, suspends and interrogates external discourses, disciplines, and constitutions. The exhibition focuses on two artists' painting practices regarding bodies and human subjects – Zheng Kaijia pays attention to the multiple forms of identity existence through self-portraiture, contemplating the fickleness of perception and the deceptive notion of a complete subject; Zhou Chi presents how the body "escapes" from predetermined values, dogmas, and frameworks through flowing lines, emancipated through creation and release.
As informed by concepts including interpellation and the mirror stage, the exhibition is grounded in the dynamics between subjectivity and external mechanisms, along with how it transforms into an introspective reconfiguration of identities. Althusser's theory of interpellation emphasizes how society hails individuals to specific identities through ideological apparatus, thereby legitimating them as social subjects.1 Lacan's mirror stage points to the existence of an idealized self constructed through external mirroring and the gaze of the Other, whose inherent dislocation and incompleteness reflect the innate split of subjectivity in self-identification.2
The exhibition focuses on moments of unanswered call where the body finds itself in a paradoxical situation of asking to be interpellated as a subject by the very social values that exclude it. The "exile" state of apatride implies a temporary suspension of identity, as described by Paul B Preciado in his essay "My Body Doesn't Exist", where the body is perceived as a "non-existent existence" excluded from the mainstream, an insurgent institution without constitution.3 The instability of subjectivity turns against the language of those who name it in order to deny it, disclosing the destitution of existing frameworks. Employing this body image as an intervention, the exhibition explores how the highly fragile, ambiguous, and unstable subjectivity represented by "non-existent existence" exerts constraint and resistance to the highly rational orders.
1 Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy. New York: Monthly Review, 1971.
2 Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage”. In Social Theory: The Multicultural Readings, edited by C. Lemert, 343-44. Philadelphia: Westview Press, 1949.
3 Preciado, Paul B. “My Body Doesn’t Exist”. In The Documenta 14 Reader, 117-34. Prestel: 2017.
Producer: Yuhui Zhou
Artistic Consultant: Junyao Chen
Curator: Sylvia Tan
Curatorial Assistants: Qifei Jiang, Yunhan Jin, Zhaohan Lu
RIPPLES
Hypha Gallery 2, Sugar House Island, London08/09/2024 - 09/13/2024
“RIPPLES” presents an evocative collection of installation, film, painting, photography, and mixed-media works by 20 emerging artists from the Royal College of Art (RCA). This exhibition challenges conventional narratives and delves into decolonial discourse through personal and communal lenses.
In our belief that there is no singular way to address decoloniality, we initiated an open call, inviting artists and curators at RCA to exchange their intimate reflections on decolonialism. Upholding principles of openness, care for reparations, and reflection, we selected 20 artists/teams and eight curators, each establishing a cohort that reflects their varying visions on the topic that ranges from discourses on diaspora communities to generational trauma and related social and cultural phenomena.
Under the themes of observing the history of control, resistance, and knowledge; transnational ways of knowing and value repatriation; and hidden narratives emerging and re-discovering identities, RIPPLES explores how decoloniality can be analyzed and mediated in contemporary times and offers an intergenerational platform to initiate and reflect on the decolonial discourse, not from the imperialist viewpoint but from personal narratives.
The exhibition will feature engaging conversations with curators during the private view and an array of programs throughout the exhibition period, such as artist talks that delve into the range of practices and performances of a healing ritual aimed at addressing the impacts of colonialism.
Artists: Amy Sarr, Canaan Brown, Chrysa Kanari, Emily Alice Mitchell, Gugan Gill, KV Duong, Lujane Pagganwala, Maria Helena Toscano, Ume Dahlia, Mariana Sánchez Hernández, Muhammad Muhammad, Ningyue Qian, Leopoldo Alejandro Farrera Cuevas, Rita Fernández, Shruti Gaonkar, Weiyue Sun, Weng-Io Wong, Yicai Pan, Yucen Liu, Yujin Son
Curatorial Team: David Tomlinson, Huiyui Lan, Jacqueline Schwartz, Pon Chanarat, Sylvia Tan, Tim C. Huang
Directed by Jane Lee, Luis López, María Helena Toscano, Polo Farerra, Ume Dahlia
RIPPLES is supported by Hypha Studios and made possible by Sugar House Island.
Website ->
Photography by Carlo Zambon and Leopoldo Alejandro Farrera Cuevas
Ripples - Artist Talk #2
Value Repatriation: Transnational ways of knowing/unlearning
Hypha Gallery 2, Sugar House Island, London08/23/2024 19:00 - 20:00
The artist talk invites audiences for an engaging discussion on Value Repatriation and explores transnational ways of knowing/unlearning. To break boundaries and rigid concepts of formats, we aim to make the dynamic of the artist talk more playful through a game-like sharing method. This approach encourages engagement and mutual exploration among artists.
Featuring: Amy Sarr, Lujane Pagganwala, Weng-io Wong
Moderated by Sylvia Tan
Photography by Leopoldo Alejandro Farrera Cuevas
The Place of Indivisible Existence
CHOWspace, No.2, Lane 41, Yuqing Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai07/26/2024 - 08/21/2024
“If existence in all its moments is all of itself, Zoe is the place of indivisible existence.” — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Through hidden site specificity, “The Place of Indivisible Existence” presents paintings by eight artists who, utilizing direct visual languages, pay attention to daily life through personalized micro-narratives, providing empirical slices and cognitive maps representing the current transient and flattened zeitgeist. Touching on themes of material landscape, cultural identity, symbolic language, myth, and subconsciousness, the exhibition explores the complexity of their dislocated yet inseparable coexistence with existing history, memory, and entities.
“The Place of Indivisible Existence” takes its title from Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili), which imagines Marco Polo’s descriptions of fifty-five fictitious cities to Kublai Khan featuring general commentary on culture, language, symbols, time, and memory. Borrowing the signifying system, the exhibition unravels the former French Concession area of Shanghai, where CHOWspace dwells, as an “invisible” context. Within it, the coexistence of pseudo-nostalgic memory interpretation and neo-consumerist business models exemplifies a discontinuous spatial narrative that not only indicates wider hybridized states of heterogeneous time, cultural hybridization, and symbolic polysemy but also exists as a social space produced through their topological extension.
Amongst the intensifying postmodernist loss of grand central narratives, the exhibition considers participating artists’ alienated conversion of daily life scenes as a micro resistance, intending to disrupt the traditional order of reductionist narratives. The silent yet complex iconography of paintings reflects conflicts between the certainty of material entities and the untranslatability of cultural symbols and linguistic rhetoric. The exhibition points to the omission, slippage, and overlap of discursive configurations, focusing on where geographic, cultural, and imagined space shifts, mingles, and reconstructs, aiming to explore the spatial-temporal potentials of obtuse meanings.
Producer: Yuhui Zhou
Artistic Consultant: Junyao Chen
Curator: Sylvia Tan
Curatorial Assistants: Zhaohan Lu, Xinping Wang
Artists: Taiping Cao, Chang Liang, Chen Yinan, Lim Kaye, Wu Yusang, Mengfan Xia, Xie Xuanxuan, Ann Yan
