Starting from the Desert. Ecologies on the Edge
Starting from the Desert. Ecologies on the Edge
2d Yunchian Biennale. Curator Marco Scotini.
Yunchian, China, Museum of Contemporary Art and several locations.
June 9- September 19, 2018
Installation, drawings, photographs, mixed media.
Conceived with the aim of measuring itself against a specific geo-historic context, and proposed as a form of minor language within the biennale system, Starting from the Desert seeks to respond to contemporary urgencies (not only in China) by adopting an 'archaeological method'. Northwest China is still considered a remote corner, but one which, owing to the historic Silk Road, has been defined through time as a place of great flows, hybridizations and exchange of people, knowledge, languages, technologies, religions, animals, spices and goods.
In relation to the possibility of reducing the Eurasian continent to simple geo-economics, which could well be implied in current large-scale projects, the Second Yinchuan Biennale seeks to read the modalities of 'group-being' at the crossroad of heterogeneous components, as indispensable to a new ecology that intends to emancipate all forms of life. In the search for eco-logics as a new paradigm of transversal thought, the Second Yinchuan Biennale attempts not to reduce these elements to the subject matter, but to utilize them in order to question the limits of the exhibition format, and thus to eventually produce a new eco-model of exhibiting.
With newly commissioned works alongside ancient artistic reliced from public museums and private collections, the Second Yinchuan Biennale has selected the 90 participating artists from over thirty regions, paying particular attention to the western borders of China (from Mongolia to Central and Southeast Asia) in a way that is consistent with the exhibition’s geopolitical, investigative methods.
