GEOPOLITICS：Contemporary Taiwan Photography

DURATION: 2023-09-05 ~ 2023-09-27
OPENING: 2023-09-05
VENUE: Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts
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GEOPOLITICS：Contemporary Taiwan Photography


Opening: 5 September 2023 from 6 - 9 pm
The exhibition will continue until 27 September 2023
Daily from 9am – 7pm except Fridays
At the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts Building 1

The project Geopolitics is conducted within the field of art, producing and presenting artworks related to and investigating geopolitical borders. It aims to challenge and question the normative notions of geopolitical borders while proposing ways to illuminate the key issues of critical geopolitics concerning the relationship between geography and power. It does so by re-examining geopolitical borders as an entity that is in a constant state of renegotiation through the discursive actions of those involved in border politics.

How can visual and installation art create a dialogue about geopolitical issues, particularly through aesthetics, that strike a balance between personal and political concerns, and by prioritizing emotion over theory? The project focuses on individuals as active agents in order to simulate the production of chance in the representation of border dynamics through art.

For the project Geopolitics, we further consider a dialogue of geopolitics within countries breaking diplomatic ties and relations with Taiwan, advancing a specific argument as to how art enacts geopolitics in such places where the dialogue between the works and the exhibition site is of ultimate importance. Once again this is done with the hope that presenting, thinking about and discussing art can create zones in which to breathe, where knots can be disentangled.

The exhibition, organised by the IDOLONSTUDIO (Union of European Asian Artists) and Darat Al Tasweer The Image Festival Amman , in cooperation with the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, offers an overview of contemporary Taiwanese photography, consisting of 53 photographs.

Artists
HOU Lulu Shur-Tzy (b.1962, Taiwan) graduated from the Department of Philosophy at National Taiwan University and in 1992 she received a Master of Fine Art degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology, U.S.A.. Now she is an Associate Professor at the Department of Crafts and Creative Design of the National University of Kaohsiung. In 2017, her solo exhibitions "Out of Place—A Trilogy on Kaohsiung Military Dependents’ Villages'' at Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, the artist’s creative work involving Kaohsiung’s Zuoying and Fengshan military dependents’ villages over the course of many years. HOU has been widely exhibited in numerous international exhibitions. Her works ''Song of Asian Foreign Brides in Taiwan'' were published in the book: ''Creating Across Cultures: Women in the Arts of China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan,'' which featured the stories of 16 leading Chinese women artists.

YAO Jui-Chung (b.1969, Taiwan) graduated from The Taipei National University of the Arts with a degree in Art Theory. His works have been widely exhibited in numerous international exhibitions. He is a leading contemporary artist who has also worked as a curator, critic, activist, and academic in Taiwan. The themes of his works are varied, but most importantly they examine the absurdity of the human condition. In recent years, he has created photo installations, one of his ongoing projects is Mirage: Disused Public Property in Taiwan, in which he has assembled photos of ruins and failed public construction projects to reveal the political and economic situation in Taiwan hidden behind the trends of globalization. YAO has represented Taiwan at the Venice Biennale and has also participated in the International Triennial of Contemporary Art Yokohama, APT6, Taipei Biennial, Shanghai Biennial.

CHENG Ting-Ting (b.1985, Taiwan) graduated from MA Photographic Studies at University of Westminster and MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths College. CHENG had solo shows in Taiwan, Japan, Spain, UK and more. Her works were seen in Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism Architechture (China), Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil (São Paulo), Tokyo Biennale, Iniva (London), MMCA (Seoul), National Art Museum of China (Beijing)...etc. In her practice, she examines our cultural, national and racial identities through reinterpreting archival materials to construct narratives in the current context.

Curator
WANG Chun-Chi is a Berlin–based curator and publication editor. She engaged in collaborative art production and research. She is trained as an artist at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. In 2012, she was Assistant Curator for Taipei Biennial, Modern Monsters Death and Life of Fiction. Her projects were presented in Berlin, Paris, New York, Taipei, Seoul and South America in various collaborations from 2010 until now. A collective and intergenerational investigation of feminism in the context of contemporary art practice that included a symposium, exhibition, and lecture. She is the founder of IDOLONSTUDIO (Union of European Asian Artists).