The Power of Doubt
Curator: Hou Hanru
Participating Artists: Hamra Abbas, Adel Abdessemed, Du Zhenjun, Thierry Fontaine, Shaun Gladwell, Jiang Zhi, Dinh Q Lê, Wangechi Mutu, Pak Sheung Chuen, Dan Perjovschi, Shahzia Sikander, Dimitar Solakov, Nedko Solakov, Sun Xun, Tsang Kin-Wah, Wong Hoy Cheong
18 December 2011–6 February 2012
Opening & Reception:
17 December 2011, 16:30
Panel Discussion The Power of Doubt
December 18, 2011, 10:30
Guangdong Times Museum
Hours:
10:00–18:00 (Free entry, closed on Mondays except for holidays)
Guided Tour Service:15:00–15:30 Every Sat. & Sun., 24 December 2011–6 February 2012
Guangdong Times Museum
Times Rose Garden III
Huangbianbei Road
Baiyun Avenue, Guangzhou
(Exit D, Huangbian Station, Line 2 of Guangzhou Metro)
Our era is the one dominated, shaped and determined by digital technologies. Our existences and identities are continuously transformed and redefined by interfaces in the form of flux of digitalised images and texts. These interfaces are oscillating between facts and fictions. They construct the contemporary substance of reality and truth.
Art and artists today, like the world itself, are largely “globalised.” Digital media—from still and moving images to the internet—are both the resources and materials for artistic production. Artists continue to confront, embrace and inquire the nature of reality, truth and dreams. But the processes are unprecedentedly fluid, uncertain and precarious while the outcomes are generating more suspense, doubt and critique than conclusion and resolution.
This is a seemingly open and liberated globalised world that, in turn, violently imposes fictions of happiness and peace through flattening the reality into an interface that compress every human activity into act of communication of a single truth. Behind the “freedom” of expression and communication provided by Google, Facebook, Youtube and iPhone, etc., in the field of economy, we can only accept to survive in a neo-liberalism system while politically we are encouraged to embrace the hegemony of a kind of “democracy” dictated by the logic of global imperialism. This is particularly articulated in locations that are experiencing social transformations.
The Power of Doubt superposes site-specific installations and existing works—in various new and old media but relating to photography as a model of perception—that embody the necessity of doubting the “mainstream” way of seeing, recording and communicating the real world, which, once again, oscillating between spectacular “truths” and dramatic fictions. Most of the artists are from countries such as China, Eastern Europe, that experience drastic changes from communism to capitalism and South East Asia, Africa, who are constantly negotiating between post-colonial memory and geopolitical conflicts, searching solution to deconstruct the double-bind status quo blocked into post-colonial and neo-liberal systems. They are also highly individualised and singular voices that cry out the collective doubts and desires of their societies while expressing highly different and diversified interests in artistic and intellectual pursuits.
It’s the hybridity and multiplicity produced by the encounter, dialogue and debates within this multitude—which represent most intensely the formation of a new global multitude of people who refuse to trust the imposed truth of the dominant system and struggle to achieve an emancipated truth—that will form a fantastic space of meeting with the public and extend invitations to their participation in the process of struggle. Here, we’ll all share the very power of doubt!
For further information, please refer to www.timesmuseum.org
