Portrait Portrait

DURATION: 2016-09-08 ~ 2017-01-07
OPENING: 2016-09-08
VENUE: Taipei Contemporary Art Center
ADDRESS: 1 Fl, No.11, Lane 49, Baoan Street, Datong District, 10346 Taipei
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As resisting accepted history and reinventing identity have become such a common social practice for our generation, we cannot help reflecting on how much desire, meaning and affection have been projected onto history, a subtext that runs through art production today. The exhibition Portrait Portrait creates an imaginary machine to explore the complex interactions between individuals, collectives and institutions in relation to the figuration of histories. Paradoxically, it both examines our desire for not being dispossessed in the process, and asks how we can act to construct different relations with it. Why do we, as individuals, aspire to transform history when what manifests as more than the totality of archival material, narration and memory that one could ever fully access, is so often deployed as an institutional tool by the ruling class? This project does not illustrate direct answers to this question, nor does it seek to provide any better version of history, or suggest what bad history might be. Instead it asks if we can grow a radically new conception that follows Walter Benjamin’s reading on Klee’s Angelus Novus, and see the storm, the violence, the progress and the paradise differently. [1] And if we can, where will such new perceptions lead? Our motivation began from a curiosity in re-identifying the primal scenes of the birth/burst of local contemporary aesthetics as a way to understand the writing of the art history outside of current empirical or post-colonial readings. To achieve this quest, we created our own methodologies to conduct our research, namely “bio archive”, “group portrait” and “imaginary institution”. Each was intended to capture some essences of history’s figuration. We employed “bio archive” to collect biographical and professional data, labor conditions, personal memories and so on. “Group portrait” inquired into the formation of collectives, communities or ideologies. “Imaginary institution” sought to invisible force or to replace the existing power construction in the social context. Working within these research frameworks, we discovered a generative space among the continuous reassembling of methods and materials. There lies an authenticity to each alternate composition or assemblage. It inspired us to perform this discursive space as an exhibition that reflects the subject and methodologies of our research in both its form and its content. Portrait Portrait is a conceptual installation in nine progressive scenarios that present the work of fifteen artists in different configurations that unfold over time. [2] Taking the chaotic motion of a double pendulum as its metaphor it traces the interrelated movements of narrative and history. Through building this dialectical system, in order to engineer alternative domains of conversation, the exhibition exposes invisible relations and movements. The boundaries between condition and situation are dissolved to generate uncertain dynamics among the exhibits. As an imaginary machine, Portrait Portrait is an apparatus that relentlessly reproduces images from the past to expose contemporaneity’s reliance on historicity in flashback. It is a machine that travels stories relentlessly. It is this relentlessness, perhaps, that is the key to understand the weight of time, our present condition, our relations with the past and with this exhibition. Henceforth, you are invited to visit the imagery worlds of the nine scenarios more than once, where artworks speak and engage with the power invested in memory and historical materials. The works may lure you in with the smell of the street vendor next to your childhood home; a song your parents sang as teens; the image your grandma used to project her fantasies onto as she grew up, or the movies you watched together with your childhood friend. However, this is intended to be neither nostalgic nor melancholic. The artistic appropriation of these everyday experiences suggests new possibilities for the production of history apart from such affective associations. If fact, as a machine to parse and re-conceptualize history, Portrait Portrait intends to operate at a distance from human agency and experiences in order to pay attention to both the exhibits as aesthetic events, and their reference points as historical evidence. Just as history cannot be fully experienced, Portrait Portrait does functions neither as a collage of reference, as documentation nor as a representation of past events. Quite in opposition to the classical white cube, it refuses to be a neutral space, but embraces subjective readings. In its metaphorical movements, the exhibition illuminates how these seemingly separated aesthetic events can keep producing new meanings and act as carriers for one another. That is to say that its various articulations amplify the dialogue between its component parts. In this way it aims to expand the aesthetic domain to acknowledge art as conceptual objects, while simultaneously seeing them as a cultural currency where their interplay allows for further generative production. They do not stand only to be gazed upon, and their modes of being should not be simply consumed, but actively engaged with. Through this Portrait Portrait suggests that the real challenge for history is not how we come to re-engage it, interpret it, or rewrite it, but how we comprehend its dimensions, principles, patterns, even its movements. Extracting knowledge and deeper perceptions from the chaos is an almost exhausting labor. But we would dare to believe that such a composition can be a gesture to bring both yesterday and tomorrow together, revealing the power of fiction and the path to imagination as a method for constituting the present. [1] The original quote from Walter Benjamin on the painting: “A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the Philosophy of History", Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969: p249. [2] The Chinese title 肖像擺 directly translates as ‘Portrait of a Pendulum’ implying an “image in motion’. Opening Events 2016.09.09 3PM Workshop by Sampson Wong: After 2014, We Don`t Have Time 2016.09.10 6PM Exhibition guided tour 6:30PM Performance by Huang Dawang: Walk Local, Sing Local Artist Jui-Chung YAO, AU Sow-Yee, Sampson WONG, Dawang HUANG, HU Xiangqian, CHOU Yu-Cheng, CHOW Chun Fai, LI Mo + KONG, Hojang LIU, Marta ROBERTI, WU Chi-Yu＋SHEN Sum-Sum＋Musquiqui, LIN Chi-Wei, LU Chieh-Te (in order of appearance through nine scenarios) Curator Esther LU, FANG Yen Hsiang, Jo Ying PENG As resisting accepted history and reinventing identity have become such a common social practice for our generation, we cannot help reflecting how much desire, meaning and affection have been projected on history at all times. The exhibition Portrait Portrait creates an imaginary machine to explore the complex negotiations between individual, collective and institution in relation to the figuration of histories. Portrait Portrait is a conceptual installation to navigate or contour the tensions between narration and histories in nine progressive scenarios that takes the chaotic motion of a double pendulum as its metaphor. Through building dialectical, fluid settings in order to engineer alternative domains of conversation, the exhibition exposes invisible relations and movements. The boundaries between condition and situation are liquidized to generate uncertain dynamics among the exhibits. What rules our perception and interpretation? What viable approaches can we employ to acknowledge the forces and traction among substances and images, and understand the forming of contemporaneity and historicity as part of the same space-time? What are the conditions of life behind the narratives? If historiography is always-already mediated with so many unpredictable factors as indicated in this exhibition and history is depicted in a chaotic motion, dare we optimistically think we need not repeat the past tomorrow? Organized by Taipei Contemporary Art Center Supported by Ministry of Culture, Department of Cultural Affairs, Taipei City Government, and RC Culture and Arts Foundation