This Exhibition Shows How Geography is Affecting the Internet
ByYunyi Lau"Landscape.gif" (2015) by Miao Ying that explores everyday existence conditioned by technology by inviting viewers to lie on the bed and look upwards at tablet computers, simulating the mundane everyday action of staring at phone and tablet screens in bed. (Courtesy of the Artist and K11 Foundation)
K11 Art Foundation and MoMA PS1 present their first exhibition ‘.com / .cn’ that is co-curated by Klaus Biesenbach and Peter Eleey of MoMA PS1 in New York. At the forefront of this exhibition are artistic practices in China and the West that respond to, or are affected by, our digital ecosystem. On show are works by artists such as Cao Fei, Li Ming, Wang Xin and Anicka Yi that engage in the practice of post-internet art, looking critically at the impact of the Internet on art and culture.
Performance video, and 26-channel video installation, “Straight Line”: 2’30”, “Landscape”: 17’26”, Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist and ShanghART Gallery
The exhibition takes a geographic stance towards this criticality, looking at the two different ecologies of the internet in the West, and the East. At the forefront of this exhibition is the fact that the “network” or “cloud” is often assumed to be homogenous and not controlled by geography or culture. Yet, ‘.com / .cn’ illustrates through art that under varying forms of state control, regional internets with distinctive characteristics have arisen, which affect social behaviour, economies, and ways of thinking.
Image courtesy the artist and de Sarthe Gallery
‘.com / .cn’ is interesting in the fact that various works and perspectives are juxtaposed against one another, for example: Li Ming’s multimedia work Straight line, Landscape that traces the artist’s journey from Hangzhou to Taiwan over the course of 50 days using both close-up, personal imagery and GPS satellite images, is compared with Serbian artist Aleksandra Domanović’s From Yu to Me, a multimedia work examines the circulation of images and information and aims to bring the underrepresented female contributions in technology to the surface.
It features Sondra Perry’s "Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation" (left foreground)
Image courtesy of K11 Foundation
Other works such as Sondra Perry’s Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation and Cao Fei’s The Birth of RMB City, both use interactive media installations to engage the viewer and confront them with an alternative reality that speaks to our current condition.
Biesenbach and Eleey cleverly put together works that speak to each other and play off one another in '.com/.cn', subtly revealing the boundaries within the seemingly homogenous omnipresence of the World Wide Web, making us reconsider our assumptions about such revolutionary technology.
Image courtesy of K11 Foundation
The K11 pop-up gallery is located at Cosco Tower, 33 Wing Lok Street, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong. The exhibitionruns from 21st March to 30th April, from 10 am to 6pm. For more information visit the K11 website here.
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