“Seduction” – A Theory-Fiction between the Real and the Possible

Venue : Soho Shangdu, West Tower - Floor B2 ( Beijing , China )

Curated by : Beatrice Leanza 毕月 , BAO Atelier ( Beijing , HK)

Exhibition Design : Li Naihan , 李鼐含 BAO Atelier ( Beijing , HK)

Within the context of cultural studies the relational forces instituted between the structural transformation of urban scales and the proliferation of information technologies in contemporary China are emerging into an expanded field of analysis. While the ‘continuous production' of modernity has so far manifested into the functional integration of political economy and social growth in the time of global connectivity and homogenized media experience, the latent discourse of culture , intended as the segmenting realm of agency where locality registers its identity, increasingly takes shape in new forms of creative production and psychological consumption.

On the backdrop of modernization and the inspirational economic leverage incited by the countdown to the Olympics, the changing relationship between politics and culture articulates within a process of experimentation which interrogates locality and its historicity against, on a side, the products of global consumerist culture, and on the other, the convergence of new models of spatial thinking and occupation, popular culture, social ‘neo-neo-tribalism', corporate branding, viral marketing and hybrid libidinal economies.

The perpetual nature of this predominantly visual production giving rise to new urban imaginaries speaks to the paradigmatic quality of fluid social networks, where communication is situational, metaphorically consumed in the digital time of internet and experienced in the superficial flux of moving images. Indeed the synthesis of global connectivity is not only challenging our sense of space, but also that of human presence within; while displacing the time of history in a one-dimensional media flow, it furthers brings into questions that of its immanent possibilities and “invisible” modes of existence. It is thus in the spatial convergence of our mental vocabulary/memory, one of compound narrativity and filmic character, and the digital tempo of contemporary hyper-production that opens up the measure for art to forge critical distance and innovative models of counter-representation.

Artistic practices that employ moving images for the construction of architectural spaces in the rehabilitation of the viewer as both receiver and producer, become thus needful metaphors refurbishing the zone between the filmic and the bodily with new references, which by destabilizing the sovereign equation between conscious perception and illusionary simulation poignantly disclose the subversive and ritualistic power of alternative individual orders.

A constructed story-telling portrayed by the experiments of 17 among international and Chinese artists, “Seduction” is a theory-fiction inspired by the homonymous book by French philosopher J. Baudrillard that will engage the public in an oblique trespassing of the fixity of reality as the place of cultural codification and stereotypical representation. Featuring diverse installation-based forms of video displaying, documentary, experimental video, and footage appropriated from personal and public archival material, CCTVs, mass media, pop culture video-clips, cinema repertory etc, the show exposes the possibility of Baudrillars's philosophy of Seduction in the reality-fiction of the local context.

The resulting juxtaposition will inform about the way new and existing forms of social consciousness and mobilization have been re-phrasing the subjective reconstruction of meaning in mediating their position in front of intense geopolitical realignments and ideological confrontations.

While opening up the liminal realm of the moving images to a mirror-sphere of metaphysical agency, Seduction ludicrously play with reversal and invalidation against the cumulative transparency of the contemporary spectacle, and by doing so enters the invisible break into the economics of relations of force (between power and life) as a deliberate provocation, one enacted by suspending its momentum of political existence within the continuity of a unique aesthetic universe.

Artists 艺术家 : Fikret Atay, Johanna Billing, Candice Breitz, Mircea Cantor, C lin Dan , Claire Fontaine, Gao Shiqiang ( 高世强 ), Clarisse Hahn, Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler, Jesper Just, Mathieu Laurette, Melik Ohanian, Ou Ning & Cao Fei ( 欧宁和曹斐 ) , Shi Qing ( 石青 ) , Ulla Von Brandemburg, Wu Wenguang ( 吴文光 ) , Zhang Peili ( 张培力 ) .  

SEDUCTION – SPACE DESIGN

 





Through the ideal city, the grand socialist city, the modern city, the social, subjective and political space are
The space architecture of Seduction accommodates the narrative of the different video pieces into a constructed environment of ephemeral simulation, where the spatial qualities of certain Beijing urban tropes and structures of spatial signification, sociality, movement, will be juxtaposed to specific filmic stories. Seduction is a staged fiction that wishes to provoke how forms and processes of production ultimately surface while questioning the reception and understanding of cultural orders as reconstructed truths.

In the underground site of Soho Shangdu parking lot, the experience offered to the viewer and the challenge put on the works presented is that of reconsidering the way they expose themselves to each other (as belonging to diverse critical/cultural/information systems and subjective spheres) while restoring that minimum distance necessary for the latent meaning of the image to remain still and become a point of collective meeting and counter representation.

In this sense the show also puts together filmic languages that are very distant yet articulates vivid coded systems within a hybrid environment. The participation of the public in the reading of the show is thus one based on displacement and surprise, unattended meetings with subconscious and alien “possibilities” of existence that the one dimensional media performance of the modernizing process often hides, yet perpetuates.

Background:

The main space setting is organized onto a LOOPING STRIP (representing a Megaform = an intersection between urban sprawl and the megastructure).

It embeds 3 MAIN MOMENTS that metaphorically represent:

1. The Ideal City (symbol of NATIONAL IDENTITY – it is the SOCIAL SPACE)
Universal patterns rule the city, the ritual and prescribed city, hierarchical, and heroic.
Space=ideal society
It is a place of utmost rules- The Total Trompe L'oil
Here dwells: nostalgia, tradition, public order, subtraction, invisible flexibility, fluid dialogue, rumors  

2. The Modern City (symbol of MODERN IDENTITY – it is the SUBJECTIVE SPACE)
Skyscrapers, extrawide avenues, cloverleaf junctions, a place of Imminent Collapse
It is Reversible Space
Here dwells: cold, mental distress, schizophrenia, alienation and hyper simulation, camouflaging

3. The Grand Socialist City (symbol of POLITICAL IDENTITY – it is the POLITICAL SPACE)
Simulated baroque city of grandiose staged power, the political majestic city, pompous, statalist.
Law of Space=Power
Here dwells: authority, personal disorder, suspended motion, law, silence
The movement is represented on a looping strip, so that the 3 moments of the city are actually a merged continuum, all of them coexist, fade into one another, are one the facet of the other. The works become appendixes describing these 3 states, while offering to the viewer a circular narrative, at which end he is left with a sense of necessary recollection. Is the journey ended