This exhibition takes its inspiration from Marquis de Sade's novel The 120 Days of Sodom. Instead of reenacting the scenes in the novel, the exhibition uses the events of a fictional murder as a narrative frame to reconsider ‘contemporaneity’. A dynamic installation and new media performance echo and intensify the exhibition theme, constructing a large-scale, multidisciplinary work that deals with the plight of civilization and sublimation of death.
Marquis de Sade lauded nature for its evil and unending cycle of creation and destruction. In The 120 Days of Sodom, Sade created a hypothetical and encyclopedic system of evil that criticized society's norms and rules, and continually went beyond the limits of all known experimental ideologies.
The performance component of the exhibition revolves around the murder of a teenager, and is divided into five sections: The Universe of Things, Homicidal Maniac, Depression, Gross Anatomy, and apparition. The intention is to identify elements, much like Sade did eroticism, perversion, and cruelty, and deploy them in various configuration with regard to position or action. The artwork is computer automated, interactive, and relates ambiguous situations, fissures and disturbances in contemporary life to video, mechanical movements, body detection devices, and lasers in a symbolic manner. The theme for the installation component of the exhibition is titled Depression/Teenager. Feathers float in the center of the installation, which are surrounded by two dimensional artworks on the venue’s four walls. Organized using an encyclopedic concept, different elements corresponding to words comes together to form these images, and build relationships between the exhibition themes.
About the exhibition
Date: 2015/10/03 - 2016/01/10
Venue: Gallery 1B
Courtesy of the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum, for further information please visit www.tfam.museum.
