Shanghai’s monumental Power Station of Art and its illuminated 165-metre chimney cuts an imposing silhouette into the city’s hazy skyline. The former power plant is the main venue of this year’s 12th Shanghai Biennale running until March 2019. With its timely title Proregress, a condensation of the terms ‘progress’ and ‘regress’ from E. E. Cummings’ experiments in poetry, the Biennale’s curator Cuauhtémoc Medina intends to grasp the complex conditions of our times.
In his curatorial concept, Medina draws a poetic connection to Yubu, an ancient Daoist dance step resembling Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk – dragging one foot after the other, thus appearing to go forward and backwards at the same time. The concept is intended to evoke the conditions of the present, as both transformative and stagnant, a “coming and going of ideas” as the curator says. Rather than Shanghai and China in general, the exhibition’s focus is rooted in a Mexican (Medina and the Biennale’s designer, Frida Escobedo, both hail from Mexio) and Western context, unfortunately leaving behind a genuine consideration of the immediate local context. Considering Shanghai’s intense urban museumification in recent years, progressively blurring the lines between art, business and entertainment – culminating in gallery spaces like K11 and its current highly instagrammable Katharina Grosse show — this seems like a missed opportunity. Yet, despite this, some works still resonate in their own way, opening up a space between the works and the viewers – if they are not too busy taking selfies for a moment, that is. Here’s our pick of what to see at this year’s instalment.
Francis Alÿs: Rehearsal I, 1999-2001
Francis Alÿs‘ red Volkswagen Beetle is damned to conquer a hill in Tijuana for all eternity. Even after the Biennale ends and the art world declares a different city to be its centre for a week, this perfect image for Proregress will keep on rolling through exhibition circuits; the orchestra’s jarring rehearsal reverberating in our minds. An image for Latin America’s “different time structure”, Rehearsal I critiques the failures of the promise of modernisation. Shanghai, far from being an old Beetle, accelerates up that dusty hill with a speed of lightning: a glorious fake Mercedes, flying faster than the real thing. It may never stop and reverse, but it may very well go in spirals, as the route was never set and the rest is lost in translation: proregressing, after all.
Lu Yang: Material World Knight, 2018
Lu Yang’s arcade of acceleration unfolds at the very end of the Power Station’s third floor — right before you stop before the panorama of Shanghai, gloomy and glorious at the same time, drawing you back into its dark underbelly. Lu Yang’s sculptural protagonists are hybrids of human, image and avatar within in a nightmarish parallel game universe; lone mutant warriors frozen in motion, without apparent rhyme or reason, but highly charged, and ready to lift off. The work of the Chinese artist is fuelled by a myriad of references stemming from religion, biology, neuroscience and psychology, encompassing installation, programming, animation game and video.
Michael Rakowitz: The Looting, 2007–ongoing
Michael Rakowitz is known for the radical hospitality of Enemy Kitchen (2003-ongoing) where he (along with with his Iraqi-Jewish mother) used food and Baghdadi recipes to open up new perspectives on Iraq. The Looting engages with the substantial destruction of cultural property after the 2003 invasion of Iraq – looting and arson in the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad led to the loss of a vast number of artifacts dating back to ancient Mesopotamian civilisations. The artist continuously recreates the destroyed objects in papier-maché made of discarded Middle Eastern newspapers and food packages: the sculptures are radiant and sublime, like artfully melted cereal cartons, yet eternal in their perfect form. The Iraqi elevator music that accompanied the installation was particularly good. I’m still trying to find that tune.
Allora & Calzadilla: The Great Silence, 2014
“So humans an parrots share a special relationship with sound. We don’t simply cry out. We pronounce. We enunciate.”
Allora & Calzadilla’s hypnotic three-screen video projection explores the notions of vocal learning and interspecies communication in an arresting interplay between reflections on the Amazona Vitatta Parrot – an almost extinct, highly intelligent and photogenic bird – and Arecibo, the world’s largest radio telescope in Esperanza, Puerto Rico. Even Jodie Foster tried to make contact with this giant ear, listening in on white noise from outer space. Science fiction author Ted Chiang collaborated for the script that intertwines these narratives with human, animal, technological and cosmic actors.
Meiro Koizumi: The New Breath After the Tempest/ Seven Deadly Sins, 2018
One surprise discovery of the Biennale is Japanese video and performance artist, Meiro Koizumi. Interested in the boundaries between private and public as well as the manipulation of collective consciousness and memory, he explores from the social climate of defence and militarisation in France after the 2015 terrorist attack. Troop presence exceeded 10,000 — a political anti-anxiety measure — when the country’s Ministry of Defence began recruiting youths from the suburbs of Paris. Koizumi collaborated with 15 local teenagers aged 16-19, with family backgrounds in former French colonies. He asked them to stage their own bodily conceptions of heroism and Shakespearean notions of bravery and fear. In an elaborate multi-screen projection, Meiro Koizumi unfolds an immersive choreography that manages to get to the paradoxical core of our contemporary condition and its performative potential with the humour and grace of his protagonists adding to the ambivalence of the work.
Hsu Che-Yu: Lacuna, 2018
“A pineapple is in the dead pig’s mouth: Kali and my big brother took a photo with the sacrifice.”
Hsu Che-Lu is an animation artist exploring the relation between media and memories and the quotation above describes a private family picture that gets to you on a very elemental level: behind two adorable toddlers, there really is a giant dead pig displayed on the table, complete with a pineapple. The voyeuristic appeal of unfolding a private family album into space is balanced out by the non-linear narration of an eerie animated movie with an absurd and dark humour — mutations of public and private memories from a childhood in Taiwan, impossible to permeate in one sitting, but intriguing nonetheless.
Alfredo Jaar: A hundred Times Nguyen, 1994
A timeless and powerful piece of political art, Alfredo Jaar’s photographic installation A hundred Times Nguyen actually manages to get the rare balance between a specific subject, universal meaning and aesthetic strength just right, without using people merely as ‘material’. In 1991, the artist travelled to Hong Kong to investigate the living conditions of the so-called “boat people”: Vietnamese Asylum seekers being held and threatened with repatriation by the British government. While interviewing refugees and the United Nations high commissioner, Jaar met a girl called Nguyen Thi Thuy, who followed him around at the Pillar Point Refugee Centre. After he asked her permission, he took a series of pictures in quick succession. Four facial expressions – lovely, opaque and ambiguous – are repeated again and again, covering the whole space: the slow emergence of a smile, or its subtle slipping into melancholy. It all depends on how we look at things.
Yang Fudong: Indeed, the Only Way, 2018
At the beginning and/or at the end of the exhibition (completing the spiral of Progregress), local artist Yang Fudong blanketed a monumental flight of stairs in red carpet. It leads up to an equally gigantic mirror; visitors are only allowed to enter and climb the stairs one by one. After a celebratory activation of the installation during the opening, a tiny video screen at the side now displays the initial performers marching up and down the stairs in rows to cheering and clapping sounds. According to the Biennale’s statement, Yang Fudong considers each of his works to be a dramatic lived experience: characterised by multiple perspectives, exploring the structures and forms of identities in myths, personal memories and lived experiences. What awaits you up there, once you climbed the stairs? Nothing at all. Just yourself. But you know that face already. And taking another selfie in an arty mirror, Biesenbach-style, does not make much sense. Or does it?
As Francis Alÿs’ Volkswagen Beetle knows very well, there’s no other way but to start the descent once again.
12th Shanghai Biennale: Proregress runs through to 10 March 2019 at Power Station of Art, Shanghai.
All images courtesy of the Power Station of Art. All photos by Jiang Wenyi.