Upcoming summer exhibitions

Summer program at Inside-Out Art Museum: May 23–September 1, 2024.

Inside-Out Art Museum is pleased to announce three upcoming exhibitions for its summer program: When the monster is speaking, École du soir, and Reinventing Publishing Inside Publishing: A Glimpse into Mousse Publishing. 

When the monster is speaking
Curated by Na Rongkun and Wang Jiayi, two young artists born in the 1990s, When the monster is speaking originates from their personal experiences and reflections. They identify with the prevalent sense of distrust and confusion among a young generation in the aftermath of COVID pandemic and recent political conflicts across the world. A critical period of their formative years was subject to the state of emergency during the pandemic. They spent a great deal of time online, experiencing a virtual reality during three years of lockdowns. The fear of ignorance and the desire to survive led them to desperately try to keep in touch with the outside world, attempting to transcend the confined physical space through online channels, and constantly being overwhelmed by information from all over the world. They had so many facts at their fingertips yet they had great difficulty in drawing their conclusions and forming their own judgements.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by Mary Shelley's 1818 science fiction novel Frankenstein. Since the last century, several futuristic science fiction film adaptations have depicted the book’s artificial, overwhelmingly powerful, stitched-together monster in search of human emotional identity in sympathetic characters and gothic parody. In fact, each adaptation of this book has been associated with the technological anxieties of its time. The imaginary of the monster and the collective unconsciousness become the coordinates by which we find our place: its changing image also represents our changing perceptions of ourselves.

When the monster is speaking, its voice overlaps with our own. The monster in this exhibition points to the new things that are not yet known, as well as the conspiracies and syndicates that have been objectified. It also refers to the desires, anxieties, frustrations, and prejudices brought by lack of cognition that lies deep in our hearts despite the technological updates that have brought about the symptoms of the times, such as information contamination, media manipulation, collective silences, and social homogenization.

École du soir (The Evening School)
Convened by artist Christian Nyampta and supported by fellow artists, institutions and networks, École du soir (the Night School) is a multiform hosting structure for collective feelings, cooperative thinking, and mutual actions. An ongoing project of the artist for many years, École du soir is rooted in research and reflections on specific experiences in Africa, creating space for emotions, thoughts and actions in the form of exhibitions, translations, publications, screenings and discussions, exploring the possibilities of building a common life in an era dominated by differences.

École du soir poses the question to us here and now: why thinking Africa? The exhibition itself is an answer to this question. Around the thread of “Thinking Africa,” these intellectually decolonizing fragments of thought take us right to the heart of the human condition. In this sense, we will reflect together on knowledge as universal and move towards human commonality. This project is a collaboration with Institute of Contemporary Arts at NYU Shanghai and curated by its director and curator Michelle Yeonho Hyun.

Reinventing Publishing Inside Publishing: A Glimpse into Mousse Publishing
This exhibition focuses on Milan-based art magazine and publishing institution Mousse, looking back at its purposeful and self-reflective publishing practice from its inception to the present day. Rather than attempting to summarize or present a coherent and consistent method of working, the exhibition aims to focus on moments of ruptures: when established institutional functions in the artistic environment fail, how publishing practice reinvents and rediscovers itself through modification and negotiation, thus opening up new possibilities for itself to remain relevant. Curated by Yin Shuai, lecturer in NABA Milan, this project is the latest edition of Inside-Out Practice, an exhibition program focusing on publishing practices in art.