Archiving the Spaces of Anxiety : From the Burrow to the Peach Colony
Author
Summary, in English
Archiving the Spaces of Anxiety exhibition in Beijing, China curated by Shuyu Chen
Archiving the Spaces of Anxiety takes its form from a transitional path that links Kafka鈥檚 unfinished short story The Burrow (1923鈥1924) and Wu Li鈥檚 painting White Cloud and Green Mountain (1668), by looking into a set of intertwining relations between the external space that surrounds us, and the internal space that belongs to our body and our feelings.
In The Burrow, Kafka writes about an unknown creature tortured by anxiety and who thus keeps building his underground world in search of perfect security. Whereas Wu Li, in his long handscroll, paints a gateway that connects the real world to the world of illusion, interpreting one of the most well-known utopian stories in Chinese literature, The Fable of the Peach Blossom Spring by Tao Yuanming (365鈥427), also translated as The Peach Colony by Lin Yutang (1895鈥1976). The spatial experience created in literary imagination and artworks offer us a position to reflect on the real space in which 鈥渢he erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs鈥 (Of Other Spaces by Michel Foucault, 1967).
Together with artists who research, act, and create around different types of spatial concepts, the curator proposes to construct 鈥渟patial archives鈥 that explores anxiety in relation to the perceived physical space and the sensory bodily space. This is also to emphasize and explore the idea of 鈥渃uratorial spatiality鈥濃擧ow does curating achieve spatiality by sensory means? How to create specific locations, relationships, and contexts for a series of 鈥渟patial archives鈥 in an exhibition space so that 鈥渟patial archives鈥 and 鈥渁rchival spaces鈥 mutually propel and expand each other in a heterotopia of subjects and places.
The exhibition and public activities will take anxiety as the gateway to the realm of idealism and cast light on how space and body mutually construct each other in history and reality. Intertwining paths and reflections are to be explored, from the bodily cavity to the balcony that transgresses the boundary between the private and the public; from the elevated protagonist to the square where the collective and individual memories merge into each other; from k枚rperbau (German, the body structure) that technologies currently take increasingly hold of, to the social body that turns things around with carnivalesque irony鈥 We invite you to walk into the utopian city EUR and meet the Asian immigrants living in the underground world, when the sunsets it鈥檚 all red, and we are situated in an empty space in the image as a gap in history, how do we examine the relationship between political, utopian and emotional expressions in words and images? How do we find our way to leave from the unbearable pleasure of security and where to go?
Archiving the Spaces of Anxiety takes its form from a transitional path that links Kafka鈥檚 unfinished short story The Burrow (1923鈥1924) and Wu Li鈥檚 painting White Cloud and Green Mountain (1668), by looking into a set of intertwining relations between the external space that surrounds us, and the internal space that belongs to our body and our feelings.
In The Burrow, Kafka writes about an unknown creature tortured by anxiety and who thus keeps building his underground world in search of perfect security. Whereas Wu Li, in his long handscroll, paints a gateway that connects the real world to the world of illusion, interpreting one of the most well-known utopian stories in Chinese literature, The Fable of the Peach Blossom Spring by Tao Yuanming (365鈥427), also translated as The Peach Colony by Lin Yutang (1895鈥1976). The spatial experience created in literary imagination and artworks offer us a position to reflect on the real space in which 鈥渢he erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs鈥 (Of Other Spaces by Michel Foucault, 1967).
Together with artists who research, act, and create around different types of spatial concepts, the curator proposes to construct 鈥渟patial archives鈥 that explores anxiety in relation to the perceived physical space and the sensory bodily space. This is also to emphasize and explore the idea of 鈥渃uratorial spatiality鈥濃擧ow does curating achieve spatiality by sensory means? How to create specific locations, relationships, and contexts for a series of 鈥渟patial archives鈥 in an exhibition space so that 鈥渟patial archives鈥 and 鈥渁rchival spaces鈥 mutually propel and expand each other in a heterotopia of subjects and places.
The exhibition and public activities will take anxiety as the gateway to the realm of idealism and cast light on how space and body mutually construct each other in history and reality. Intertwining paths and reflections are to be explored, from the bodily cavity to the balcony that transgresses the boundary between the private and the public; from the elevated protagonist to the square where the collective and individual memories merge into each other; from k枚rperbau (German, the body structure) that technologies currently take increasingly hold of, to the social body that turns things around with carnivalesque irony鈥 We invite you to walk into the utopian city EUR and meet the Asian immigrants living in the underground world, when the sunsets it鈥檚 all red, and we are situated in an empty space in the image as a gap in history, how do we examine the relationship between political, utopian and emotional expressions in words and images? How do we find our way to leave from the unbearable pleasure of security and where to go?
Department/s
Publishing year
2021
Language
English
Links
Document type
Artistic work
Publisher
OCAT Institute
Topic
- Visual Arts
Status
Published