"Exchange Capture" (Shanghai Version) Performance Artist: Ge Xing Performer: Wei Man Wei Qin Zheng Lingmin
16.11.2020-7.8.2021 Winsia Performance Performance Painting Colored Lead on Paper 2020-2021
60 Time Gestures: 1 Hour, Wenner Graphite on Paper 2020 ◎ Junlei NNHR
Exhibition: There is a break in between – a time expression of different worlds
Duration: 2021.12.03-12.26
Venue: Liu Haisu Art Museum, Shanghai
Online conversations with Berlin-based artists often begin at dusk, both because the time difference between Shanghai and Berlin is 7 hours, because the artist's eyes gradually brighten in the dark of night, and the Minerva owl, a symbol of philosophical wisdom, only begins to fly at night.
Art and night, and women have a deep and indissoluble relationship. In Michelangelo's four tombstone statues of "Morning, Dusk, Day and Night" completed for the Medici family, the one named "Night", although similar in size to the other three, always shows unexpected heaviness and depression in appearance. The statue is a tall and graceful woman with a low neck and a braid that falls heavily on her chest. Coupled with the ill-intentioned night owl under his feet and the mask describing the grotesque under his armpits, the unspoken pain and pressure surround the sculpture and gradually accumulate in the flow, as if a nightmare moment that is deeply trapped in a dream but unable to wake up itself is frozen here.
If the sculpture "Night" represents the humanist ideas of Michelangelo in the Renaissance, then for the new pressures felt by modern people in accelerating society, especially in response to the increasingly technological social reality of the contemporary era, the three female artists from Berlin, Stella Geppert, Saskia Wendland and Nicole Wendel) intends to find another way of performing that is closer to its own artistry, to capture the rhythm of life belonging to our time with a healing and feminine reflection. Their installations are quietly opening up to the audience at the "Breaks Between" exhibition held by Liu Haisu Art Museum.
Capturing meaning in communication and opening up the "original time" of the self
Women, art and time, behind each word hides a deep mystery. The danger lurking in the daily life is that in the face of a huge mystery of a large amount, it has not yet waited to find out and understand, and it is already deeply entangled in the mystery of ambiguity. Just for the issue of the artistry of time, there is a multidimensional perspective to explore the aesthetic value of natural objects in art, as well as the era and era of the Anthropocene on the shaping of artistic style. If we add an artistic understanding of the abstract concept of time, the collision of time and art is enough to tell more than ten stories of "One Thousand and One Nights". Let us select three representative keywords from them, the repetition of communication, posture and self-reconstruction, combined with the specific works in "Intermittent Naps", and deeply feel the creative ideas from contemporary Berlin women artists.
Ge Xing is a professor at the Halley School of Art and Design, where he is responsible for the practice of sculpture and space art. The world and people are a particularly huge information exchange device in her vision. Under the general trend of increasingly poor communication and increasingly tendency of human beings to close themselves rather than open their hearts, the design of an artistic installation imitating cryptography to express and capture the meaning of ingenuity may be able to equip modern people with locked doors to another hidden speculum. In the way of the fog responding to the fog, in the appearance of an inexhaustible mystery, immerse yourself in the scratches of time left by people in the artistic experience.
Due to the epidemic, Berlin artists could not really come to Shanghai, but could only send their works by sea. Among them, the scaffolding of the nearly three-meter-high installation art "Exchange Capture" was personally completed by the staff of the Cultural and Education Department of the German Consulate, one of the organizers of the exhibition. The emphasis on practical hands-on ability in German education is evident from this, and it once again suggests that contemporary art, which values time, has revised the emphasis on the spread of space art and returned to respect for the nameless individual and the real experience of specific people.
"Communication Capture" carries the imaginative understanding of ancient Oriental concepts by Western plastic arts, using sparse brackets and white paper to assume a state of existence close to "nothingness", not pre-screening performers, but friendly and open to welcome any active experiencer who enters the exhibition hall. The installation structure covering an area of about ten square meters quietly awaits in the second exhibition hall of the Liu Haisu Art Museum, like a quiet and miniature poetic corner of the earth, expecting communicators to jump out of different emotional rhythms.
On the second day of the opening of the exhibition, one of the co-organizers, the Cultural and Education Office of the German Consulate in Shanghai, held a mixed online and offline after-effects symposium. Through the screen of the zoom meeting, You can hear Winsya trying to hide her low mood. She recalled that from November 2019, when she began to prepare for the creation of "Intermittent Naps", until the full two years of the European epidemic period, the "Red Circle" series, which has been created many times in a row, for the first time is not because of the length of time, but because the experience of time has taken on a new emotional imprint.
Those who are familiar with German thought and culture will know that there is a stronger and more prominent view of time in the German national psyche. Emmanuel Kant's walks on the Philosopher's Trail became a reassuring place for residents to tune their clocks in the small town of Königsberg. All-encompassing, all-dimensional thinking around time has always been a common theme in all kinds of German art. However, not every German listener liked Beethoven with "a lot of notes", and likewise, the female artists of contemporary Berlin clearly no longer agree with goethe's description of collective labor at the end of Faust. Winsya's work is more in line with the contemporary German philosopher Safransky's view of time - "original time, time towards the self". The interpretation of the rhythm of the body is to awaken the whole body awareness of the self at a fixed time of each day, and to draw those equally high red circles with the same material and medium day after day.
Standing in the exhibition hall of the Liu Haisu Art Museum, facing these overlapping giant red circles that contain the feeling of "I" day and night, you can feel a very unique idea, from the moment of imminent exhaustion to try to break the shell, change, and save yourself. One of the coercive sides is the constant operation of the track prescribed by scientism, and after entering the orbit, the rhythm of the self-body is found and repeated, and the oriental artistic realm of pursuing the aesthetics of silence is added out of thin air in the behavior. This may be related to the fact that Winsya, who was born in Potsdam, received a Kyoto scholarship and lived in Japan for two years. The serenity of traditional Japanese art allows her to more consciously lead to the depths of her own soul, presenting the thought of time that condenses the true nature of the present in a lively and natural way.
Love children, but also love works, clear and honest posture and concepts
Judith Butler writes in The Gender Troubles that the female subject is represented by a performative construct, or plays a certain gender. For Wenner, who has been engaged in painting and performance since graduating from the Berlin University of the Arts, if artistic paths directly related to "existence" can be designed in the performance, the gender element can transition to contribution, rather than blindly creating trouble. Just as she never hid her motherhood, she never cut her responsibilities to her children at home by participating in art tours around the world.
At the preparatory meeting to discuss which day to hold the post-show dialogue, Vernier clearly and firmly opposed one of the proposals on an alternative date. There was only one reason, it was her child's birthday, and as a mother, she could not let her child cancel the birthday party that she had been looking forward to for a year for her work. Her statement was blurted out and appeared extraordinarily frank because it didn't think twice.
For "Between Naps", Wennell designed a composite work that combines material exhibition and performance performance, "60 Time Gestures". Using chalk, graphite and other materials that can leave traces, accurately time 1 second, 1 minute and 1 hour, allowing the performer to figure out a repeatable action that best suits their movement habits, and repeatedly record the trajectory of the action on paper with the selected material. 1 second is too short to count, almost a complete action is exhausted before it is done, and 1 hour looks like a labor, if it is not to feel the realism of a specific length of time in the performance, I am afraid that few people have enough patience to immerse themselves in repeated line drawing actions.
Ultimately, the large works on paper hanging on the walls of the pavilion reveal the time understood by female artists in the shades of ink and the sparseness or density of traces. Perhaps after women become adults, what they can never give up in their hearts is the love and concern for children, which belongs to the scope of natural motherhood. At the same time, reflecting another side of the true self in the works that exude their own creativity is also the unremitting pursuit of female artists. The child and the work share the time of the female artist and together construct her presence. If gender consciousness can bloom some unexpected artistic flowers in the chemical cooperation of time, the endless feeling of undercurrent in the depths of the creative impulse often has a particularly touching power.