The Power of Doubt exhibition features special devices and a number of old and new medial work. They all have one thing in common, they are all based on photography as a form of observation, bordering between the shocking reality and dramatic fantasy. They demonstrate that we need to question the means of mainstream observations, recording, and communication with the world. Most of the featured artists hail from South Asia and Africa, where people are still debating how they choose between a lifestyle with a colonial legacy and geopolitical conflicts.
Preface
by Curator Hou Hanru
Our era is one dominated, shaped and determined by digital technology. Our existences and identities are continuously transformed and redefined by interfaces in the form of a flux of digitalised images and texts. These interfaces oscillate between fact and fiction. 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 resource and material for artistic production. Artists continue to confront, embrace and inquire into the nature of reality, truth and dreams. But the processes are unprecedentedly fluid, uncertain and precarious while the outcomes generate 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 compresses every human activity into an act of communication of a single truth. With the “freedom” of expression and communication provided by Google, Facebook, Youtube and iPhone, etc., in the field of economy, we can only expect to survive in a neo-liberalism system if 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 places that experience social transformations.
The Power of Doubt superposes site-specific installations and existing works – using various new and old media but relating to photography as a model of perception – this embodies the necessity of doubting the “mainstream” as a way of seeing, recording and communicating the real world, which, once again, oscillates between spectacular “truths” and dramatic fiction. Most of the artists are from countries such as China or Eastern Europe, that have experienced drastic changes from communism to capitalism and South East Asia, Africa, who are constantly negotiating between post-colonial memories and geopolitical conflicts , searching for a 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 a highly different and diversified interest in artistic and intellectual pursuits.
It is the hybrid nature and multiplicity produced by this encounter, dialogue and debate within this multitude – that most intensely represent s 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 extends an invitation to their participation in the process of struggle. Here, we’ll all share the very power of doubt!
About the curator
The San Francisco-based, Guangzhou-born curator Hou Hanru has a number of international biennials under his belt as having curated the Lyon Biennale, the Istanbul Biennale and the Venice Biennale. In 2011, Hanru curated “The Power of Doubt” at the PhotoEspagna fair and the Museo Colecciones ICO in Madrid, and in 2010 he organised “By Day, By Night, or some (special) things a museum can do” at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. As is reported by The Art Newspaper, he will lead the fifth Auckland Triennial in 2013.
About the exhibition
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
Opening & Reception: Dec. 17 2011 16:30
Panel Discussion The Power of Doubt : Dec. 18 2011 10:30
Exhibition Period: Dec. 18 2011 to Feb. 6 2012 10:00-18:00 (Free entry, closed on Mondays except for holidays)
Courtesy of the artists.
