Little Movements II: Self-practice in Contemporary Art
29 June–3 November 2013
MUSEION of modern and contemporary art Bolzano
Via Dante 6
39100 Bolzano, Italy
Curated by Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu
Museion opens Little Movements II: Self-practice in Contemporary Art on June 28, an exhibition co-curated by Liu Ding & Carol Yinghua Lu, both guest curators of Museion for 2013. Liu Ding is an artist and Carol Yinghua Lu an art critic and curator, both based in Beijing. Together they have co-curated Little Movements I and the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale 2012.
Little Movements II is a research, discussion, publishing and exhibition project in the field of contemporary art and theory, which examines conceptual and experimental artistic, curatorial, institutional, publishing, art history research and art educational practices and models that base their independence, autonomy, quality and intensity of thinking and practicing on a self-reflective awareness, as well as on the internal motivation of a creative practitioner and active producer.
Driven by the aspiration to search and establish new methodologies, the practices discussed in Little Movements continuously examine the most basic conditions of art-making. They challenge and stretch conventional understanding, definition, assumption and the very order of discourses that shape the dominant histories and narratives of contemporary art. These practices, transformations, inventions, reinventions and decisions involve much more than simply fulfilling institutional requirements or general expectations and designated roles of the art industry. They are triggered, rather, by a commitment to art and experience of first-hand engagements in practice. Their formulations, growth or eventual closure came about as a result of urgent concerns at each historical moment and their intellectual strength is supported by their intuition and imagination.
This project was initially presented as an exhibition and a publication in Chinese at OCAT Shenzhen in September 2010. Invited by Museion to present the project for the second time, the curators have used the opportunity to develop the concept and project further by conducting more research and by using the project itself primarily as a medium for experimentation with curatorial thinking and exhibition making.
At Museion, 17 practices are presented in the exhibition, which aspires to be an iteration of the idea of equality based on creative and critical subjectivity in all forms of practice from anywhere and any moment. The choice, perception and presentation of these practices in this exhibition by the curators is not bound in any way by any order of significance based on their geographical, periodical, structural, disciplinary or historical positions. The exhibition is, in a way, the creation of a space in which “neither materials nor methodologies would dominate and the endless taxonomy of constitutive components which characterizes so called ‘interdisciplinarity’ could be suspended with.”
The practices presented in Little Movements II
Ai Weiwei and Black Cover Book, White Cover Book, and Grey Cover Book; Rasheed Araeen and The Third Text; Hans Belting and Global Art and the Museum; James Cahill and A Pure and Remote View: Visualizing Early Chinese Landscape Painting; Paul Chan and Calvin Tomkins on Marcel Duchamp; Chen Tong and the Borges Libreria Institute for Art; Luc Deleu and Vipcity; Geng Jianyi and 45 Degrees as a Reason, and Agreed to the Date 26 Nov. 1994 as a Reason; Han Dong and They; Jens Hoffmann and The Exhibitionist; Lu Yue and Mr. Zhao, The Obscure; Andre Malraux and Musée imaginaire; Hito Steyerl and The Empty Centre; Anton Vidokle and unitednationsplaza, e-flux; Wang Guangyi and Zhuhai Meeting; Igor Zabel and Individual Systems; Once is Nothing Little Movements: Self-practice in Contemporary Art in OCAT.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication (dt/ita/eng) with essays by Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu, Su Wei, Hently Yapp, Letizia Ragaglia et al., published by Walter König Verlag.
Museion’s institutional partners are the Provincia Autonoma di Bolzano and the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Bolzano. Sponsors: Thun, Barth
