Jun 7–July 2, 2017
Minority Space
Room 1605, City’s Xinhai’an Elegant Garden
Beijing
China
minorityspace.org
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Minority Space’s second group exhibition will take on the contemporary spectacle we are dwelling in where an avalanche of pictorial and literal informations are constantly distributed and circulated via various medias. This chaotic and overwhelming proliferation exhausts our cognitive ability to digest and process informations, while challenges the logic or principle that determines how we make selection and even how we create new informations. The situation have urged not only a reconstitution of the concept “appropriation” as a mainstreaming creative method, but also an updated criterion to evaluate and interpret contemporary praxis.
The exhibition will introduce the conception of “postproduction” articulated by Nicolas Bourriaud to describe artists‘ reprogramming and re-editing actions to the preexisting artworks, alike what deejay and editor does in the audiovisual industry. What is shared among the exhibited artworks is their manoeuvres to select or to sample from other artefacts, then to translate or recode into new incarnations. In the same time these works provide new perceptions stemmed from present about the preexisting cultural products whose historical importances and stands have rooted in the past. Travis Jeppesen’s “16 Sculpture” series could be seen as a reinterpretation of pre-existing sculpture works from different periods, or an autonomous anthology of object-orientated writings, whose medium instability and fluidity is shown in the various forms it can be produced into.
The works in Tan Tian’s project How to Make a Contemporary Art Work are batches of annexations made by sampling and mingling other famous artists‘ signature pieces. The strategy and gesture the artist applying is more significant than the circumstantial and dependent forms of their outcomes. Alan Resnick extracted the reflected images from Jeff Koons‘ mirroring sculptures, then reprogrammed them into a virtual reality environment. Copy Copains Club is a group of like-minded practitioners who copy each other’s work repeatedly which not only eradicates the line between artists and laymen, also manifests the scrambling of boundaries between consumption and production.
Postproduction, as an operational manner, abandons the medium as a label or embedment attached to the work, requires to appreciate the medium-unspecific idiosyncrasy or the “unoriginal genius,” as well as the manoeuvre the postproduction artists have applied to reprogram and reactive the past. Besides trying to loosely address the topology of the postproduction practice, the exhibition also intends to rise reconsideration about the curator’s role in the cultural production, since whose work is also making selection, sequencing a ‘playlist’ and contributing interpretation in order to assert a statement. Will the roles of artist, curator, musician even designer also be better identified or generalised as the “post-producer” in the future of cultural production when postproduction operation becomes the dominant normality?
About Minority Space
Minority Space is an independent contemporary art space based in London (UK) and Beijing (PR China). Aims to be a catalyst for creative expression of emerging artists, the space is dedicated to provide international artists and curators a physical space to realise their ambitions projects. Focussing on the cultural landscape in contemporary, the Minority Space embraces the independency and autonomy, takes a global, multidisciplinary and non-canonical approach to the research, presentation, creation and interpretation of contemporary art. With the two locations in two continents, the spaces will also be functioning as a cultural tunnel to delivery exchange, communication, collaboration between UK and China. The Beijing venue, located at Wangjing area, near the Central Academy of Fine Art and 798 Art Zone, is set to facilitate the creative growth of contemporary Chinese art. Minority Space will devotedly present group exhibitions driven by curatorial notions, site-specific commissions, as well as interactive and educational events.
For further information please contact: info [at] minorityspace.org
